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The guy who led the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulation of the Hanford Nuclear Plant for more than 8 years died Tuesday.
Dennis Faulk, retired Hanford assignment manager for the Richland EPA, 64.
He will be remembered Wednesday as an advocate for the cleanup of the Hanford site, which made a lasting difference.
“He’s tried to do the right thing, whether other people are watching or not,” said Susan Leckband, chair of Hanford’s advisory board for most of Faulk’s time leading the EPA’s work in Hanford.
The Washington State Patrol reported that Faulk was driving in Copalis Beach in Grays Harbor County, Washington, on Monday night when his pickup truck pulled into a river access point. The car stopped as it began to flood with water and eventually plunged into the waves.
Faulk was taken to hospital in Aberdeen, where he died Tuesday morning.
He led EPA’s Richland from 2009 to 2017.
Both the EPA and the Washington State Department of Ecology are working on the Hanford site, adjacent to Richland in eastern Washington state, where the federal government now spends $3 billion a year on environmental cleanup.
The Hanford nuclear stockpile is infected with radioactive and dangerous chemical waste from places beyond the production of plutonium for the country’s nuclear weapons program from World War II to the Cold War.
“Dennis is a strong leader, he knew the importance of the cleanup project at Hanford and the EPA’s cleanup priorities,” said Stephanie Schleif, nuclear technology manager for Ecology. “Dennis was very encouraging, welcoming, and elicited laughter in the complex regulatory discussions we had. I would have in the cleanup. “
When he retired in 2009, Alex Smith, then head of Ecology’s nuclear waste program, wrote to Faulk to say he would miss “his sound advice, his straightforward and fair answers to even the toughest questions, and his unwavering determination toward a cause. “”safe, moderate, and thorough cleaning in Hanford.
Part of Faulk’s legacy lies in his successful opposition to the Energy Department’s plan to dig garbage cemeteries along the Columbia River in Hanford.
Instead, the DOE sought to cover them with soil to prevent rainfall from deepening contamination in the soil.
Faulk argued that long-term prices would be just as high, if not higher, than those of digging up pollution.
His stance that a deep cleanup was needed proved correct when loads of highly radioactive spent uranium fuel parts were discovered buried near the river, Smith said when Faulk retired.
John Price, former director of the Ecology segment of the Hanford Tripartite Agreement, said work has been completed on one of the 50 radioactive sites Faulk wanted to excavate.
Faulk is working with the state and DOE to expand a plan to clean up the 220 square miles along the Columbia River as a highlight of his career.
By the time he retired, much of the work had been done to demolish many buildings, dig up buried waste, demolish research reactors near Richland, and store most of the plutonium-producing reactors along the river long-term while some of their radioactivity decays. .
Smith also praised Faulk’s role in the phase-out resolution that led to the creation of the 200 West pumping and treatment facility at Hanford, a complicated plant aimed at removing contaminants from infected groundwater in downtown Hanford.
He was also passionate about saving the historic Hanford B reactor, now a component of the Manhattan Project’s National Historical Park, when the DOE said it’s “not in the museum business. “
Faulk has asked questions about his role as a regulator, which has delayed the resolution to begin demolishing the reactor’s external parts to put it in a cocoon — or put its core in a transient garage — until Congress passes the law for the national park.
Their questions were good, but their purpose was to delay the process until a resolution was made on the reactor’s conservation, said Maynard Plahuta of the Reactor B Museum Association.
“He is a tireless advocate for the preservation of Reactor B as a museum,” Price said. “He did everything he could as a regulator to make the museum a museum. “
Faulk is also among the officials who helped create Hanford’s advisory council.
Rick Bond, who represented the state Department of Ecology at Hanford’s advisory board meetings before he retired, said Faulk was smart to see both sides of the issues.
Dave Einan, the current director of the EPA’s allocation at Hanford, called Faulk “the glass half full. “
Smith praised Faulk for his orientation toward new staff, and Einan said he was running to make sure new EPA workers were engaged and involved. He had a natural way of making sure everyone was working together,” Einan said.
“He cared about people,” Leckband said. She called him a “serious guy” and a “big family man. “
Faulk, a Washington State University graduate and avid Cougar football fan, has had season tickets for football since the 1980s.
He was a professor of agriculture at Toppenish in 1985 when he accepted what he thought would be a three-month job at Hanford. He would enroll with the EPA six years later, bringing hands-on experience in the operation of the Hanford N reactor and plutonium completion plant.
Faulk lived in Grandview, the city where he was born, and spent his winters in Texas.
He is survived by his wife, Vicki; daughter Alena Dunn of Minden, Louisiana, and son Zachary Faulk of Mesa, Washington.
Smith Funeral Home, Grandview is for your memorial arrangements.
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