Bartley Fain, EEO/diversity coordinator, reports that ORP has an active intern program.

The Department of Energy’s Office of River Protection (ORP) is a small organization with a big reach. Although its current staff is only about 120 people, the office is responsible for the largest and arguably the most challenging environmental cleanup project in the U.S.

The office is one of two DOE entities at Hanford; the other is called simply the Richland Site (RL). ORP was created in 1998 to manage the River Protection Project, which involves the storage, retrieval, treatment and disposal of 53 million gallons of high-level radioactive waste.

The waste was generated by the DOE’s Hanford Site, a Cold War plutonium manufacturing facility. If left untreated it would threaten the Columbia River, a major waterway in the Pacific Northwest.

The project will create the world’s largest radiochemical processing facility and ensure that the Columbia’s water remains safe. The disposal method is vitrification: the waste is encased in molten glass that hardens for stabilization and long-term storage.

Roy Schepens was named director of the Office of River Protection last year.

Vitrification is not a new process. It’s been used for some time at the DOE’s Savannah River cleanup site and elsewhere. But the scale of the current project is far beyond anything so far attempted, says Roy Schepens, who was named director of the ORP last year.

Like many government agencies, the ORP fulfills its mission through contractors. Most of the 5,000 engineers and other workers on the project are employed by Fluor, Bechtel, CH2M Hill and a variety of other environmental and construction specialists. DOE employees from ORP and RL oversee the project work.

ORP’s 120 staffers include MEs, EEs, ChEs, CEs and nuclear engineers, all with significant experience, Schepens says. Although most of their duties involve oversight of the contractors’ work, he notes that there is also some research underway in the vitrification area.

As part of the DOE’s overall diversity effort, which it calls its “human capital initiative,” the demographic statistics of ORP are carefully tracked. The Hanford site has had a diversity council for the past six years, but “The initiative here started when ORP split off and we needed to get a diversity program going,” Schepens says. “Ever since I’ve been here, I’ve been looking at the stats and comparing them to what we should look like.”

Direct hiring of ORP employees is minimal at the moment. “Right now we’re mainly backfilling to replace people who move on,” Schepens explains. In fact, the act that established the office contains a “sunset” provision that mandates re-examination of ORP and several other remediation projects in 2010.

U.S. Department of Energy Office of River Protection www.hanford.gov Headquarters: Richland, WA Employees: About 120 Budget: $1.1 billion (FY 2002) Mission: Environmental cleanup of Hanford radioactive waste

Since ORP is part of the larger DOE facility in Richland, ORP employees may have the opportunity to move to RL or to DOE facilities in other parts of the country. “We want them to stay within the DOE family,” Schepens says.

Even though there’s not a lot of permanent hiring, ORP has an active internship program, says Bartley Fain, EEO/diversity coordinator and deputy diversity manager for ORP.

DOE interns at the Hanford site may work with ORP or RL; most site contractors have active intern programs as well. About ten interns typically work each summer directly with DOE at Hanford, Fain reports. DOE interns are involved in all aspects of the vitrification and environmental cleanup activities at the site.

To find its summer internship and term-time co-op candidates, DOE uses two national internship organizations: the Association of Western Universities (www.awu.org) and CI Interns (www.ciintern.com). Both organizations work closely with a number of minority-serving colleges. That supports ORP and DOE in its efforts to increase workforce diversity, Fain notes.

Interns who register with the services can also find internships at several Hanford contractors, Fain adds. For example, Fluor Hanford, Inc, the largest contractor at the site, looks for ChE, EE, ME, nuclear, civil/structural and environmental engineering majors and works through the CI Intern organization to find them.

If there’s no permanent ORP slot available for a graduating intern, there may be an opportunity elsewhere in DOE, or with a contractor. “As part of the DOE, we have a role in building a pipeline of technical employees,” Schepens notes. “We can get positive outcomes for diversity even though we’re small.”

D/C