2020 Year in Review Report Cover

2020 Year in Review Highlights

  • Completing the East Tennessee Technology Park Vision 2020 at Oak Ridge, which became the first site in the world to remove an entire uranium enrichment complex.
  • Starting operations at the first-of-a-kind Salt Waste Processing Facility at the Savannah River Site  — the last major piece of the site’s liquid waste treatment system — with the potential to process as much as 9 million gallons of liquid waste per year.
  • Achieving significant advancement of two other key components of DOE’s tank waste treatment mission:
    • Increasing progress in construction, startup, and commissioning that are critical to the Direct-Feed Low-Activity Waste system at the Hanford Site.
    • Continuing modifications at the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit, which will turn about 900,000 gallons of liquid radioactive waste into a granular solid at DOE’s Idaho National Laboratory Site.
  • Completing demolition of the Plutonium Finishing Plant, which was once the highest risk building at the Hanford Site.
  • Breaking ground on a 2,275-foot deep utility shaft at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, a key infrastructure piece to support future operations at the site.
  • Resuming cleanup at the Energy Technology Engineering Center after more than a decade, including demolition of a dozen buildings and setting a path to completing demolition of all DOE-owned buildings at the site in 2021. 
  • Reaching a milestone 11 million tons of mill tailings shipped from a former uranium ore processing site in Moab, Utah, to a disposal cell near Crescent Junction, Utah.
  • Completing remediation activities on and around the historic Tonopah Test Range in Nevada, and conveying 70 sites to the DOE Office of Legacy Management (LM) for long term stewardship — the first EM-to-LM transfer in more than a decade.
  • Completing site restoration at the Separations Process Research Unit in New York State and turning the site back to the DOE Office of Naval Reactors.
  • Implementing the full Interim Measure for addressing the chromium plume at Los Alamos to hold the spread of chromium contamination within the site boundaries as a final solution is developed and put in place.
  • Successfully implementing the Department’s first application of its science-based high-level radioactive waste interpretation through the shipment of a small quantity of waste from the Savannah River Site for safe off-site treatment and disposal.
  • Putting in place the first end-state style contracts at the Hanford and Nevada sites, with several others progressing across the EM complex.