Ines R. Triay

Assistant Secretary for Environmental Management, Energy Department (since May 2009)

(DOE.gov)

Why She Matters

Triay sees her life as the kind of story "that only happens in the United States of America." Born as dawn was about to break on communist Cuba, her family fled to Puerto Rico and then to Miami. She said that when her parents arrived, they had "nothing but their dreams for a better life and their love for freedom, it would have been impossible to believe that their daughter would ever be nominated by the President of the United States to serve this great country."

Triay is now at the top post in the Energy Department's Office of Environmental Management, overseeing the world's most complex nuclear clean-up program. Most of her job involves mitigating the footprint of Cold War-era nuclear arsenals and their side effects, like contaminated water and soil.

In Her Own Words

"Safety must remain our top priority: no schedule, milestone, or cost consideration is worth any injury to our workers or any adverse effect to the public or the environment."

More on: Ines R. Triay

At a Glance
Path to Power
The Issues
The Network
Campaign Contributions
Additional Resources

Corrections?

Background

At a Glance

Career History: Deputy Assistant Secretary for Environmental Management, Energy Department (2007-08); Chief Operating Officer for Environmental Management (2005-07); manager, DOE Carlsbad-area field office (1999-2005)
Birthday: 1958
Hometown: Miami, Fla.
Alma Mater: B.S.-University of Miami (1980), Ph.D.-University of Miami (1985)

Spouse: Dr. John Hall
DC Office: U.S. Department of Energy, ATTENTION: Office of Environmental Management, 1000 Independence Ave., SW, Washington, D.C. 20585 Phone: 202-586-7709
Email
Web site

Path to Power

Triay was born in Cuba in 1958, the same year the United States cut off military aid to the country-just before Fidel Castro's communist revolution. When she was three years old, she and her parents joined thousands in fleeing Cuba after America broke all relations and Castro secured communist ties with the Soviet Union. "When we left Cuba they knew they could never go back and they had one suitcase each, full of family pictures," Triay later recalled. "The only thing they really took with them was their education."

The Triay family went into exile in Puerto Rico. Her father, an electrical engineer, and her mother, a piano and dance teacher, found success in Puerto Rico but moved to Miami, Florida, seeking opportunity for their daughter. They became naturalized citizens, and Triay went on to attend the hometown University of Miami. She chose to study chemistry, because she found it to be the most essential and applicable science, earning her B.S. in 1980 and her Ph.D. in physical chemistry in 1985.

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New Mexico

Soon, Triay was recruited by the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico as a post-doctoral staff member in the Isotope and Nuclear Chemistry Division. Working in the Los Alamos lab, she found mentors who she recalls fondly as "giants in the field of nuclear science." She rose through the research ranks during the mid-to-late 1990's, and was ultimately named acting director of the chemical science and technology division.

Controversy Over Waste Isolation Pilot Plant

In April 1999, Clinton Energy Secretary Bill Richardson picked her as manager of the DOE's Carlsbad-area field office.

One of her top responsibilities was overseeing the newly-opened Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), America's only deep geologic repository for disposing transuranic waste (which is radioactive). During Triay's time as manager, the plant's receipt of transuranic waste shipments increased to 25 each week from the previous one or two.

In September 2003, an audit by DOE officials found that 98 55-gallon drums of the WIPP's nuclear-waste shipments from the Los Alamos lab had not been inspected properly. The equipment WIPP had used to measure radiation levels failed to register the low reading of this waste, which was not radioactive enough to merit disposal there. When the news surfaced in the following weeks and criticism swelled over WIPP's violations of refuse criteria and taxpayer dollars, the DOE cut off deliveries to the plant from Los Alamos. By the end of October, Triay announced she would resign from her post and form a private homeland security company in New Mexico.

But instead, Triay stayed on as manager until January 2004, when she left for a job in the DOE's Office of Energy Management at its Washington, D.C. headquarters. There, she served as deputy chief operating officer and worked on the agency's environmental cleanup program, which brought her back to New Mexico to address decades of pollution at Los Alamos and testing conditions at WIPP. Some New Mexico critics accused these federal DOE efforts as overstepping their bounds.

In early 2005, she returned to the Carlsbad field office to serve again as acting manager, and in February of that year, shipments from Los Alamos to WIPP resumed. In the coming months, Triay sought to reduce the number of tests required on materials sent to WIPP in order to relieve its expenses, preparing a 500-page permit application submitted in April 2005 to New Mexico's Environmental Department. These requests were approved through a process culminating in October 2006, when the department issued a comprehensive permit that lifted a ban on shipments of remote-handled transuranic waste to the plant, allowed for alternate testing methods on deliveries before they arrive, and other efficiency measures.

In May 2005, Triay was transferred back to D.C. as DOE's chief operating officer for environmental management. Her other initiatives there have included cleanup efforts at Colorado's Rocky Flats nuclear-weapons site and Ohio's Fernald uranium-processing plant.

Head of DOE Office of Environmental Management

In September 2007, when the office's chief cleanup official, Charles Anderson, decided to retire, Triay was tapped to succeed him as deputy assistant secretary. In that role, she supervised 70 project directors and a corps of around 30,000 employees and contractors at work on environmental management issues around the country. Starting in November 2008, she served as acting assistant secretary for Environmental Management, and was formally confirmed in May of the following year.

The DOE's office of environmental management oversees the largest environmental cleanup effort in the world. In large part, this involves reducing the footprint of nuclear-waste sites left from the days of the Cold War, a task to which Triay says, "I have dedicated my life."

In April 2009, Triay announced that $6 billion of the February 2009 stimulus package would be used for environmental management cleanup projects at Cold War-era facilities.

Triay has won numerous honors, including the Presidential Rank Award, the Wendell Weart Waste Management Lifetime Achievement Award, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers' Dixy Lee Ray Award for Environmental Protection, the National Atomic Museum's National Award of Nuclear Science, and others.

The Issues

Triay has said of her role in the DOE's office of Environmental Management, "There's a policy part of my job, a strategic direction part, and the part that deals with the resources."

Ultimately, her office actively oversees cleanup of "the legacy of the Cold War and energy research performed by the DOE and its predecessors," and she explained, "Our work is with highly radioactive waste in underground tanks and excess nuclear materials, as well as lower-level waste and contaminated soil, contaminated water and excess facilities." After having worked with the DOE for about a decade, her policies seem to align with that of the agency itself.

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Project Financing and Management

The Office of Environmental Management is one of the most criticized and underfunded in the federal government. State lawmakers fight over resources needed for local cleanup projects, while rejecting money spent elsewhere as wasteful.

Meanwhile, toxic sites in several states have fallen behind on deadlines and exceeded their budgets. "The Environmental Management program has come under considerable criticism over the years in the execution of its projects," Triay said during her 2009 confirmation hearing. "We must strengthen our project management capability and improve the skill set of our project management teamsaggressive efforts are underway to transform the Environmental Management program into a "best-in-class" project management organization. We are implementing processes and procedures for quality assurance and for identifying and managing project risks."

Earlier that month, Triay announced that $6 billion in 2009 federal stimulus funding would be spent on projects overseen by her office, which is about equal to her office's entire annual budget. She has also said that life cycle costs of project cleanup could approach $300 billion. "Given the economic climate over the past several years, footprint reduction cleanup activities have often been deferred in order to fund higher-risk activities," she explained during an April 2009 testimony before the Senate Armed Service subcommittee on Strategic Forces.

She later added that stimulus money would go towards "footprint reduction and near-term completion cleanup activities." As part of this effort, Triay seeks to use that funding to create thousands of jobs.

Safety

Given the nature of her work, Triay consistently cites safety as her primary concern. People on nuclear-project sites can be exposed to the most dangerous materials known to man. As she wrote in an open letter to colleagues in July 2009, "safety must remain our top priority: no schedule, milestone, or cost consideration is worth any injury to our workers or any adverse effect to the public or the environment. We remain committed to a safe workplace culture and expect EM to continue to maintain the highest safety standards for all the work it performs."

She also submitted a statement to the record before her confirmation hearing in which she explained that "under my leadership, EM will identify and minimize the programmatic risks associated with start of construction during the early stages of the design phase. EM is incorporating technology readiness assessment and maturity planning into construction and cleanup projects at all stages," as well as a requirement for "safety to be integrated early in the design phases of projects."

In addition, she noted that on-site field offices should have increased autonomy over their own cleanup projects: "It is my philosophy to delegate as much authority as possible and appropriate to the field offices and their managers. If the field managers had more authority than they do now, the EM program might be more efficient."

But when Energy Department Inspector General Gregory Friedman announced in May 2009 that safety violations were found during cleanup at the Savannah River Site on the South Carolina-Georgia border, Triay admitted inadequate project supervision.

Friedman issued a report citing the use of substandard construction materials that could have led to a major radioactive spill. "The issues identified in this report represent a failure of contractors and subcontractors to properly implement existing requirements and policies," Triay wrote in a statement. "Environmental Management agrees that current practices can and should be enhanced to provide greater federal and contractor oversight."

Energy Parks Initiative

Triay refers to the Energy Parks Initiative as a project that can convert environmental-management liabilities, such as contaminated facilities, into new energy sites.

This would involve collaboration with DOE offices, other federal and local government agencies, and industrial interests in the private sector to transfer toxic cleanup sites into spaces for renewable energy that would promote economic interests.

The Network

After having worked under a Republican administration for nearly a decade, Triay remains in her office as a new political regime takes over. She reports to Energy Department Secretary Steven Chu.

While in New Mexico, Triay was given her first government position by Bill Richardson, who was Energy Secretary at the time and is currently serving as the state's governor.

Campaign Contributions

Triay donated $2,000 to George W. Bush's 2004 presidential campaign. There is no record of her having contributed to any campaigns during the 2008 presidential election cycle. In 2002 and 2006, she donated $1,000 and $500, respectively, to Pete Domenici's Senate campaigns (R-N.M.).

Additional Resources