Hanford gets a new top manager for vit plant, tank farms

The Department of Energy has picked a project director from a Hanford cleanup contractor as the new manager of the DOE Office of River Protection.

Brian Vance will be one of two top federal managers of the Hanford nuclear reservation, the agency announced Monday morning.

He replaces Kevin Smith, who led the Office of River Protection for nearly five years before retiring at the end of September.

The Office of River Protection is in charge of 56 million gallons of radioactive and hazardous chemical waste in underground tanks and the $17 billion vitrification plant being built to treat the waste for disposal.

The Richland Operations Office and its manager, Doug Shoop, is responsible for the rest of Hanford environmental cleanup and overall management of the site.

Vance is a project director at CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co., responsible for leading the team developing the remotely operated equipment that will be used to clean up the highly radioactive spill beneath the 324 Building just north of Richland. The team also is responsible for installing the equipment in a mockup facility, where it will be tested and used for worker training.

Vance starts work as the Office of River Protection (ORP) manager Nov. 6.

“I know he will be able to leverage his skills and expertise to assist ORP in maintaining the strong momentum now underway to address the Hanford tank waste mission and continue making progress at the Waste Treatment and Immobilization (vitrification) Plant,” said Jim Owendoff, acting assistant secretary of the DOE Office of Environmental Management in Washington, D.C.

Vance has more than 30 years of leadership experience on nuclear-related projects.

He was a submarine officer with the U.S. Navy from 1984 to 2009, when he retired as a captain. He had successively responsible leadership positions for projects, according to DOE.

More recently he has held project management roles in major commercial nuclear projects. He was a principal project manager for Areva NP from 2009 to 2013 and then was director of product development for Westinghouse Electric Co. before joining CH2M in 2016.

Vance was not available for an interview Monday, but said in a statement that he was excited to continue DOE’s successful work in radioactive tank waste, which he called one of the largest environmental challenges at Hanford.

Smith said that his retirement in September would allow the next manager to gain a thorough understanding of the Hanford tank farms and the vitrification plant before the plant begins treating some waste as soon as 2022.

The waste is left from the past production of plutonium for the nation’s nuclear weapons program.

The Trump administration has proposed a budget of $1.5 billion for the Office of River Protection’s work in the fiscal year that started this month, although Congress has yet to set a DOE budget for the fiscal year.

This story was originally published October 23, 2017 at 10:05 AM with the headline "Hanford gets a new top manager for vit plant, tank farms."