New SRNS President Says Strong Performance, Safety Among Company Priorities

EM Update recently spoke with Stuart MacVean, the new president and chief executive officer of Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS), the management and operations contractor at DOE’s Savannah River Site (SRS) and its EM program, about his new role and the contractor’s objectives and challenges ahead.

You’ve been president of SRNS for a little over two months. How has the transition gone for you and what are your biggest priorities going into 2017?

It is an exciting time to be at the Savannah River Site and it’s a great opportunity for me to be able to serve in this capacity. I was really able to hit the ground running from day one because of my past experience at Savannah River. Previously, I led the tank farms mission at SRS as president of Savannah River Remediation and that certainly gave me a good foundation to start from, but my real leg up was that I was responsible for the nuclear materials disposition program in 2007 and 2008. I’m very much enjoying working with both Jack Craig, manager at DOE’s Savannah River Operations Office, and Doug Dearolph, manager at the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) Savannah River Field Office. 

I’m impressed with the depth of the nuclear production and nuclear materials expertise at SRNS and the execution of those missions in parallel with the growth of Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) and the important site infrastructure responsibilities. 

My predecessor, Carol Johnson, worked hard to put in place a culture of continuous improvement and it was clear to me upon taking over in October that such a culture was taking hold. It’s having a dramatic impact on how the site is operating — we are becoming much more efficient and those dollars are being redeployed to invest in our infrastructure. 

From a priority perspective, I am focused on delivering good, strong performance from our nuclear production facilities, a top-notch safety record and more efficient site operations. Everything we do for both our EM and NNSA customers flows from those priorities.

SRNS has made a significant effort over the past several years to address a common challenge across the complex — an aging workforce. Have you started to see results?

We absolutely have. Not long ago, it appeared we were facing a very real “retirement cliff” in the near future and we took a number of very important steps, made quite a bit of investment, to address that. Today, we are no longer facing that cliff and, in fact, the average age of our workforce in now 49 as compared to 54 just a few years ago. We’ve added more than 1,300 new workers in the last three years, 80 percent of who were hired right out of the local area. 

One of the more interesting things we are doing is using predictive analysis to forecast attrition and retirement impact by department and work function so that we know precisely what skills are needed over the next five years. We use that planning to understand insertion times for targeted recruitment and focused retention that allows us to focus on targets including minority-serving institutions and veterans programs as well as specific skill areas like fire protection engineers, occupational safety and health, and engineering. 

We are also looking down the road to build our workforce. In addition to establishing a nuclear operations program at Aiken Technical College last year, participation in our internship program is up 34 percent from 2015, with 145 students in summer 2016. We have hired approximately 20 percent of our graduating interns since 2014. 

Perhaps most importantly, once we get the employees onsite, we are making sure they are part of a system that rewards their hard work, invests in their development and provides opportunities for growth and advancement. 

How will SRNS enable the continued growth of SRNL? 

We are exceptionally proud of SRNL and the contributions the lab makes to the nation. SRNL’s unique capabilities are increasingly being called upon to solve problems at DOE sites and for a host of national security missions. Growing SRNL has been one of the primary objectives for SRNS since the inception of our contract and by any measure, there has been amazing progress.  

In recent months, we’ve taken steps to make it easier to utilize the resources SRNL has to offer. Beginning on Oct. 1, SRNL began operating as a separate business unit under SRNS, which will enhance the independence of the laboratory and its ability to maintain a strategic relationship with the Department of Energy. 

At the same time, DOE has changed its governance model for the lab so that SRNL now has a more direct relationship with EM headquarters rather than being primarily managed as part of Savannah River Site operations. 

All of these steps will further enable the growth of SRNL and allow the lab’s unique capabilities to be fully utilized.

A little over a year ago, SRNS made the decision to halt all operations not essential to the safety and security of the site after it became apparent that workers at the HB Line facility were not following proper procedures. Has the ‘safety pause’ been successful in refocusing operations?

The last year has been what I would term our year of recovery. We have demonstrated to the workforce that when problems become apparent — at any level of the organization — it’s important to take proactive and positive action. Our workers have seen that our safety culture is not just a slogan on a poster somewhere — it’s something we live every day. That has made a tremendous, positive impact on our safety culture. 

I’m immensely proud of how our workforce responded to the safety pause. Through their hard work, we actually ended the year meeting all our targets, the performance-based incentives in our contract.  

Additionally, by focusing our attention on training and procedures, we’ve put in place a system that not only will alert us to issues before they become big problems, but also has helped us make our operations more efficient and effective.

That is having a real impact as the plants that support the production missions are poised for a truly record breaking year in 2017. Because of our operational reset last year and the recovery this year, they are really off to a good, strong start for 2017. We are operating our spent fuel recycling plant, HB Line is completing the current plutonium oxide campaign, plutonium disposition packaging is underway and we are ready to meet our tritium deliverables.   

It’s also notable that in fiscal year 2016, we delivered every project in our portfolio — 20 projects — on time and under budget; that’s approximately $70 million budgeted in projects that were delivered for $54 million, or 22.9 percent under budget. Certainly, we have had some past challenges on projects like the Waste Solidification Building, but we’ve turned around our project performance. We recently achieved a major milestone completing the first phase of a coal ash basin cleanup project, consolidating 80,000 cubic yards of ash and dirt onto an existing landfill about 17 football fields in length. We are on a really solid footing going into 2017 with the processes and procedures we have put in place. That is driving our success and the performance this year clearly shows it. 

What are the key challenges in your mind going forward and what are the metrics and indicators that you will be paying the closest attention to?

One of the biggest challenges that we have is the upcoming bid cycle that kicked off this fall. It has the potential to cause a lot of distractions. We are working hard with our workforce to keep everyone focused on the mission at hand — that is a key priority of mine.

One of the things that will help with that challenge is that after the safety pause in 2015, we have in place a long-term sustainment program that’s really meant to give us early warnings if things are starting to slip. As part of that effort, we’ve evolved our contractor assurance system and there are a lot of elements to that program that give me confidence in our ability to make sure our safety and operational procedures are being followed, that we are doing our work in the safest, most effective way possible.