President-Elect Barack Obama (D) has selected a veteran team of regulators and administrators to fill the nation’s top energy and environmental posts, a team that sources say will be focused on climate change and developing renewable energy sources. He formally announced his picks for energy secretary, Environmental Protection Agency administrator, chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, and a new advisory position to coordinate policies on climate change and energy across all federal agencies Dec. 15. Environmental groups say they like what they see in the nominees. Obama has asked former EPA Administrator Carol Browner to serve as
The U.S. Energy Dept has awarded its last major revamped management contract this year at a U.S. nuclear cleanup megasite, selecting a URS Washington-division-led team for a $3.3-billion, six-year award to manage liquid wastes at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C. It bested a competing bid from a team led by Parsons Corp. and including Fluor Corp., a Parsons spokeswoman confirms. The URS venture also includes Babcock & Wilcox, Bechtel National Inc., CH2M Hill Constructors Inc. and AREVA Federal Services LLC, the U.S. unit of the French nuclear technology firm. The award returns URS to a significant management role
It is going to take a risk-based strategy on the federal, state and local levels to provide hurricane and flood protection in New Orleans and mitigate risk associated with disasters nationwide. “We are looking at a multihazard approach, multiple lines of defense and nonstructural methods, such as emergency preparedness for mitigating risk,” said Earthea Nance, New Orleans' first director of disaster mitigation planning, at last month’s annual meeting of the American Water Resources Association, in New Orleans. “The traditional disaster-protection paradigm is predicated on a strong federal role and a diminished local role. In New Orleans that resulted in an
Chesapeake Bay advocates are disappointed that U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and state officials failed to set a firm deadline for reducing nutrient pollution in the 64,000-sq-mile Chesapeake Bay watershed at last month’s annual meeting of federal and state leaders overseeing the cleanup effort. Bay advocates are threatening legal action to force officials to commit to cleaning up the bay. “They didn’t commit to anything that is going to reduce pollution,” says Roy Hoagland, vice president for environ-mental protection and restoration of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. He says efforts to clean up the bay have been unsuccessful, even though billions of
Construction is beginning on the largest design-build civil works project in the history of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, a $695-million barrier designed to protect New Orleans from storm surges similar to that generated by Hurricane Katrina, which inundated the low-lying city in 2005. Slide Show Photo: Angelle Bergeron / ENR Surge barrier to protect New Orleans is the largest design-build job in Corps history. Related Links: Behind the Scenes in a Casting Yard Photo: Angelle Bergeron / ENR Mike Spruill Sr. says all his casting jobs post-Katrina are simply bigger. Barrier piles are 140 ft long. The Inner
Washington state sued the U.S. Energy Dept. Nov. 26 in federal district court in Spokane for failing to meet key milestones for cleaning up 53 million gallons of high-level radioactive waste at its 586-square-mile Hanford former nuclear weapons site near the Columbia River. Photo: U.S. Energy Dept. Lengthy cleanup of aging waste tanks is lawsuit focus The lawsuit addresses DOE's pace in emptying 177 massive underground waste tanks, many of which date to the 1940s when atomic bombmaking began at Hanford, and are leaking into groundwater. The state is also demanding earlier completion of the site's $12.3-billion Waste Treatment Plant,
San Francisco’s $4.4-billion Hetch Hetchy Water System Improvement Project has passed a major milestone with the approval of its program environmental impact report. The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission began planning for the program, consisting of 85 projects, in 2002 to improve the system’s ability to operate in the aftermath of a major earthquake. The program is funded by a bond issue approved by voters in 2002. Construction of many smaller projects has proceeded while the report was being completed on 17 larger sections valued at $1.8 billion. Construction on many major projects will begin in the next six to
The speaker repeated it twice for effect: “Nothing humans can do in mitigation between now and 2100 will affect the level of sea-level rise between now and 2100.” The rise will be substantial, possibly close to one meter, said Michael K. Orbach, professor of marine affairs and policy at Duke University Marine Laboratory, Beaufort, N.C. “We cannot stop it. All we can do in the next century is adapt to it,” he added. Slide Show With much of the Gulf Coast at low elevations, forecasts of rising sea levels show flooded infrastructure. With much of the Gulf Coast at low
Thousands of workers daily take the train from their homes at Slavutich, across 55 kilometers of unpopulated woodland and marsh in northern Ukraine to their workplace. No ordinary commuters, they are workers at the Chernobyl powerplant, scene of the world�s worst-ever nuclear disaster. Nearly 4,000 people work at Chernobyl, safeguarding the destroyed reactor building No. 4 and tending to the three surviving shut-down units. Among the construction teams is Alexander Nikolayevich Plotnikov, project manager at contractor Utem Engineering, Bucha. Slide Show Photo: Eric Schmieman Background radiation levels determine type of protective gear and how long workers are allowed to toil
Cleaning up Cold War-era nuclearweapon sites remains the U.S. Energy Dept.’s single-largest financial liability, totaling an estimated $266 billion, says a Nov. 17 agency report. Related Links: Huge Cleanup at Bomb-Making Megasite Is The New Atomic Fallout The report, validated by accounting firm KPMG, classifies DOE’s environmental-management program as an “unfunded liability” because its budget is set through annual congressional appropriations, as opposed to a dedicated funding stream. The report claims that factors such as the delay in opening the planned Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada could drive the cost higher. “Estimating this liability requires making assumptions about future activities
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