“Exciting and bittersweet” is how Anthony Buhl, CEO of EnergX, a contractor at the U.S. Energy Dept’s Oak Ridge nuclear waste cleanup site near Knoxville, Tenn., describes his portion of the complex’s stimulus infusion gained early this year.
About $125 million of Oak Ridge's total of $755 million in new environmental funding under the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act is boosting his firm's efforts to remove huge stores of nasty transuranic (TRU) nuclear waste that date to the site's World War II-era Manhattan Project origins.But the firm's 86 new jobs and two extra work shifts seem almost minuscule in an area hard-hit by manufacturing and retail downsizing. EnergX's Website drew 4,250 resumes for the new jobs offered, and a job fair held last spring generated lines of applicants “more than 100 yards long all day long,” Buhl says. “These folks were excited to wait for three or four hours for a five-minute screening.”