Leo Sain, president and project manager for cleanup contractor UCOR, near the east wing of the mostly demolished K-25 Building, which was built to enrich uranium during World War II.
Note: This is an edited copy of a letter that UCOR President Leo Sain sent to company employees on Aug. 1.
To All UCOR Employees:
As we begin our third year on the job here at East Tennessee Technology Park, I want to thank everyone for an outstanding two years.
I am so very proud of this workforce. Our performance has been truly spectacular in every way. K-25, one of our nation’s largest deactivation and decommissioning projects, is nearly on the ground, and we’ve begun pre-demolition work in K-27 significantly ahead of schedule. We’ve disposed of over 120,000 cubic yards of waste while safely traveling over 1.5 million miles. We have handled and disposed of almost 25,000 shipments of waste at the Environmental Management Waste Management Facility and Oak Ridge Reservation landfills combined. In our first year, we took on an safely completed two projects that weren’t even in our scope, removal of Tank W-1A and remediation of the K-1070-B Burial Ground. In addition, we achieved Earned Value Management System certification, completed contract true-up, and received formal approval of our performance measurement baseline. In our second year, we completed closure of the TSCA (Toxic Substances Control Act) incinerator and completed removal of all Central Neutralization Facilities sludge. We continue to take on new scope with two additional projects at Oak Ridge National Laboratory—Building 3030 (Isotopes Development Lab) and Building 3026 (Hot Cell Complex). We have fully implemented our Safety Conscious Work Environment and received U.S. Department of Energy verification of our Integrated Safety Management System. All of this has been accomplished while staying well under budget and ahead of schedule.
Most notably, we’ve done our work safely. At the end of two years, we’re one of the safest cities in the DOE complex. The credit for that goes entirely to you, the workforce, for staying focused on your work through all the distractions and changing hazards that come with the tasks we perform.
As we begin our third year, I’d like to issue a reminder and a challenge. No matter how good our performance is, we are only one inattentive moment away from an accident that could hurt someone—or worse—and bring all our good work to a screeching halt. More distractions are coming. It’s just the nature of our work. Please stay as focused and disciplined as you have to this point.
My sincere thanks go out to each and every one of you.
Leo Sain
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