Ken Niles: 31 Years of Hanford Lessons
After 31 years at the Oregon Department of Energy, including 19 as Assistant Director for Nuclear Safety and Emergency Preparedness, Ken Niles will hang up his Hanford hat at the end of the month to enjoy a very well-earned retirement.
To say Ken will be missed is a serious understatement. He has left his mark in state government, from the stellar team he has developed here at the agency to the decades he has spent fighting for Oregon’s best interests in the Hanford Nuclear Site cleanup. As his final month wraps up, Ken shared his thoughts and lessons learned with the Tri-City Herald, the local paper of record for the Hanford and Richland-area community.
Ken Niles
Excerpt the Tri-City Herald, August 10, 2020
Ken Niles
Nearly every day for the past 31 years, I have thought about, talked about, read about, or wrote about the Hanford Nuclear Site.
After more than three decades of working on the Hanford cleanup on behalf of the State of Oregon, the last 19 of which I spent heading up the Oregon Department of Energy’s Hanford program, I will retire August 31.
It’s a dramatically different Hanford now than the site I first saw on a cold, snowy day in February 1990.
At that time, we didn’t know for certain that Hanford’s plutonium production mission was over. The first, tentative steps of the cleanup were just beginning, with no hint of the multi-billion dollar, multi- decade endeavor it would become. Westinghouse Hanford was expected to begin construction within 18 months on a plant to “vitrify” or immobilize Hanford’s high-level tank waste, and there was similarly no hint that actual construction would not begin for more than a decade and the plant would still not yet have begun operations.