b'P ROVING THE P RINCIPLEin motion the analysis and proceduresLearning to Love D&D that would result in the 1994 consolida-tion of five major Site operating con-tracts under one contractor, LockheedF red Tingey said to me, I have a favor to ask of you. Were in the process of Martin Idaho Technologies Company.starting up a D and D program at the Site. Itll be the first new program that Henceforth, DOE announced, everyEG&G has started and not inherited from the previous contractor. Wed like it incumbent contractor could assume thatto look good, get it organized well and done right. Id like you to set it up.the next complex-wide contract wouldbe competitive. New evaluation andAs he told me all this, my mind was racing a hundred miles an hour. Id never selection criteria were expected to holdheard of D and D and I didnt know what it meant. Finally I said, Fred, Im down costs and improve performancereally embarrassed. You keep talking about D and D, and Im not sure what that on well-defined tasks. 5means.He said, Oh! Well, its decontamination and decommissioning. Its in the wastemanagement program. I just about died. In those days, waste managementmeant garbage. I had seen pictures of trucks hauling stuff and dumping it in a Environmental compliance tasks werepit. How do you explain to your familyyour parents especiallythat theyve structured by a variety of laws pertain-invested all this money to get you trained as a scientist, and now I was going to ing to the removal of hazardousleave the high-tech world of lasers and start dumping stuff in pits! I felt horrible. wastes. The INEL had been designatedas a Superfund site under theBy the time I got the program set up and operating, it was one of the more interest- Comprehensive Environmentaling things Id ever done. There was lots of boom-boom stuff, and we had research Response, Compensation, andmoLiability Act (CERCLA). This andn ey. It was fun figuring out how to decontaminate something. We looked atbiodecontamination of soil and all kinds of explosive dismantlement techniques for several other laws required that landsst r uctu es . and waters contaminated by hazardousrsubstances be invento-When you got done with a job, it was very ried, evaluated, andsatisfying to walk away and see green grass remediated. The growing there: a site returned to its natural E n v ir onmen t a lconditions. Or we made a building useful Protection Agency,for someone who needed a facility, and we DOE, and the Idahoprovided it at a fraction of what it would Department of Healthcost to build new. I stayed fifteen years. and Welfare mutuallyagreed in 1991 toRichard Meservey work as partners inexecuting a consentorder spelling out howNot everything from historic programs was each problem area atdismantled. In 1988, Big Mama hauled the two HTR INE L would be priori- experiments from the Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion tized and remediated. 6program at Test Area North to a visitor center at thesite of EBR-I.INEL88-0590-22-924 6'