Newly Updated Strategic Vision Sets Course for EM Cleanup Over Next Decade

The newly updated Strategic Vision document provides a clear, concise roadmap to guide EM priorities for the next decade. It comes as EM makes its way into a new era across the cleanup complex, focused on achieving goals in addressing tank waste, demolishing contaminated buildings, remediating contaminated soil and groundwater, and safely managing and disposing of waste.

"The Strategic Vision 2023-2033 is intended to help us gaze further out to a place we want to be in the future," EM Senior Advisor William "Ike" White said. "It sets EM on a course that will span a decade and inspire us all to achieve EM's vital nuclear cleanup mission."

The cleanup program is also focused on ultimately closing cleanup sites, and the Strategic Vision targets four of them for completion of legacy cleanup activities in the next decade. They are the Moab Uranium Mill Tailings Remedial Action Project in Utah; the EM-Nevada mission at the Nevada National Security Site; the Sandia National Laboratories site in New Mexico; and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory site in California.

Built on successes achieved in recent years, Strategic Vision 2023-2033 is an update of previous editions and was developed through outreach and with feedback from regulators, tribal nations, EM advisory boards, local communities and other partners.

"While EM has had its fair share of challenges over its history, the program has also realized tremendous success to date, thanks primarily to the dedicated men and women throughout the DOE complex safely and efficiently performing legacy environmental cleanup every day," White said. "We've cleaned and closed major former weapons sites across the country. We've built the nation's first geological repository to safely manage and dispose of radioactive waste. We've built complex first of-a-kind facilities to address one of the government's largest environmental risks. And we have successfully and safely demolished some of the largest buildings ever constructed."

EM's vision for its cleanup sites over the next decade includes:

• Treating and stabilizing radioactive tank waste in glass at the Hanford Site through the Direct-Feed Low-Activity Waste System, ramping up the site's high-level tank waste capabilities, completing significant risk-reduction activities such as transferring cesium and strontium capsules to dry storage, and placing the last of the former production reactors, K West Reactor, into interim safe storage;
• Emptying and closing up to 22 of 51 underground waste tanks at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and completing disposal of remaining legacy transuranic waste;
• Completing the new Safety Significant Confinement Ventilation System, utility shaft and other key infrastructure upgrades at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico;
• Completing disposal of uranium-233 at Oak Ridge, and completing construction of the site's new Mercury Treatment Facility;
• Completing treatment of remaining liquid sodium-bearing waste at the Idaho National Laboratory Site;
• Finalizing and implementing long-term treatment approaches for contaminated groundwater at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico;
• Demolishing two former uranium enrichment process buildings at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio;
• Completing deactivation activities at the C-333 former uranium enrichment process building and beginning fieldwork for the C-400 remedial action at the Paducah Site in Kentucky;
• Completing the first phase of demolition activities at the West Valley Demonstration Project in New York; and
• Initiating soil remediation and final groundwater treatment approaches at the former Energy Technology Engineering Center site in California.

Most importantly, EM will continue to perform work activities within a strong safety culture that integrates worker and public health, safety, and environmental requirements.

The Strategic Vision 2023-2033 is available here.