An Unprecedented Organization for an Unprecedented Time

As part of LM’s 20-year anniversary celebration, this profile is part of a series of current and former LM employee profiles of people involved in different areas of the LM mission.

It’s mid-morning on a school day and David Geiser, a retired official for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), is between classes at an all-girls preparatory high school where he now teaches engineering, coaches varsity volleyball, and is a sponsor of the robotics team. 

“Trust is directly proportional to how much information you're willing to provide, right?”

His question, intended to be rhetorical, is also retrospective of his work at DOE’s Office of Legacy Management (LM).

By the time Geiser arrived at DOE in 1991, he had already worked for the U.S. Navy as a nuclear-trained officer for eight years followed by a job in the private sector evaluating European waste management practices.

He joined DOE the same year the Cold War ended, and the Soviet Union collapsed. The DOE had recently created the Office of Environmental Management (EM) to address the environmental legacy of radioactive and chemical waste, contamination, and hazardous facilities from the Manhattan Project’s nuclear weapons production and research during World War II.

The cleanup was a massive undertaking with more than 150 contaminated sites. But the work was moving at a clip and, as each site reached closure, DOE officials realized remediation was not enough.

“I think they saw this wave of sites getting to completion or already completed and said, ‘We need to create some long-term home for those sites,’” Geiser said.

Congress agreed there was a need for ongoing monitoring, and in December 2003, LM was born. When EM first passed the baton to LM, Geiser was on the team that took it and ran. 

As the director of the Office of Policy and Site Transition, Geiser’s first order of business was to build a team of experts. Tom Pauling, an EM project engineer, was one of the first to join LM.

“It's easy enough to take the budget mark and hand it to another organization,” said Pauling. “But to make sure that that handoff isn't dropped, you have to have some notion of how you want to do that.”

From the outset, Geiser said he noticed the stark differences between EM operations at their height and LM’s initial work. 

“There was no one physically on-site,” said Geiser. “That was the complete opposite of the EM cleanup sites, which had literally thousands of workers coming in and doing the cleanup.”

The budget was different, too. Some sites had budgets totaling many hundreds of millions, but the LM team had a fraction of that allowance with a mandate to make it work. Geiser describes LM’s first couple of years as a game of survival.

“The message was stand up the organization and don't screw up,” he said.

Geiser said the advantage of coming after the EM cleanup was the trove of lessons learned. Chief among them was transparency and communication with local stakeholders. In response, DOE allowed something unusual and gave the public access to the government database.

“Basically, you could look at any groundwater well and any site that Grand Junction (Colorado) had responsibility for and see the data associated with it over time,” he said.

Geiser and his team then started building a plan for sustainable monitoring by streamlining operations. He credits the contractor at the time with an innovative approach to downsizing the contractor workforce with the introduction of remote monitoring.

“This was early ‘internet’ – something we take for granted now – but 20 years ago the idea of remote monitoring of the operation and equipment was relatively new,” Geiser said. “We could reduce the number of workers and have them work eight hours a day, five days a week instead of 24/7 because someone else was monitoring the site in real time.”

The idea that defied skeptics and wowed even those directly involved in LM’s efforts was the plan to build disposal cells that contained radioactive waste and other contaminants securely underground. The tops were mounds that could reach up to 70 feet high.

“One of the innovations was to build a disposal cell that people could climb to the top of and feel safe about any kind of exposure,” Geiser said.

Geiser said he felt that aspirational mission was accomplished with the opening of the Weldon Spring Site Interpretive Center in St. Charles, Missouri. The trek to the top, once thought impossible, is now a tourist attraction at more than one site. 

Pauling, who was named the deputy director of LM before his own retirement in 2018, said Geiser’s combination of strengths – policy wonk, technical expert, and trustworthy envoy – assured the survival of LM.

“He was able to engage people in Washington, D.C., especially the budget personnel who he built so much trust with that they would approve our budget every year,” Pauling said.

Geiser was named deputy director of LM in 2005. He climbed the ranks of the office he helped build and was appointed director in 2010.

Upon his retirement in 2016, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz awarded him the Secretary’s Exceptional Service Award, the highest award given to federal employees. 

Geiser is enjoying his second act as a teacher and praises an incredible team of dedicated colleagues for accomplishing the loftiest goal of the office. 

“The case for the beneficial reuse concept was, if you're going to spend a billion dollars cleaning something up, people should be able to use it.”