ALEXANDRIA, Va. - Serving as the keynote speaker at this year’s National Cleanup Workshop last week, DOE Under Secretary for Science Paul Dabbar highlighted the importance of innovation and collaborating with communities as EM enters a new chapter energized by a completion mindset.
“This Administration is focusing on American innovation through smart investments, streamlined regulations that open up opportunities, collaborative approaches to problem solving, and full utilization of the unmatched resources our national labs have to offer," Dabbar said. He also noted progress in modernizing the cleanup program, advancements in American energy production, and job growth.
About 650 EM stakeholders attended the fourth-annual workshop organized by the Energy Communities Alliance, which represents local communities near DOE sites. EM and the Energy Facility Contractors Group served as cooperating organizations in the event.
DOE recently grouped EM, the Office of Science, and the national laboratories under Dabbar’s purview. As EM Assistant Secretary Anne White leads the cleanup program with an eye towards project completion and site closure, Dabbar said he’s focused on “maximizing the Department’s capabilities through greater synergy to better manage costs, solve challenges, and ensure the highest level of safety."
The national laboratories envision possibilities, maximize opportunities, and develop smart solutions to the nation’s greatest challenges including the nuclear waste cleanup, he said.
“Getting to completion and closure requires that we fully utilize our labs in a focused way to tackle remaining technical challenges, shorten schedules, and bring costs in," Dabbar said.
The Under Secretary, who has visited numerous EM sites this year, pointed to progress across the cleanup complex, including the new ventilation system at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant and the new Saltstone Disposal Units at the Savannah River Site.
“As these individual successes accumulate one after the other, month after month, year after year, cleanup momentum builds and the completion mindset that Anne talks about develops," he said.
Dabbar emphasized the value of engaging the cleanup communities and other key stakeholders to broaden support for the EM mission, achieve shared goals, and lay the groundwork for the next-generation American workforce.
“America is getting back to that place where we have the ideas and the confidence to just get things done," Dabbar said. “We have the commitment to innovation needed to make it possible and we have highly skilled men and women in the field making it happen at our EM sites and beyond."
Source: U.S. Dept. of Energy, Office of Environmental Management
