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UCOR adds safety innovation award to portfolio of recognitions
September 8, 2021


ucor innovation award
(L to R) VPPPA Chair Person Terry Schulte, UCOR’s Clint Wolfley, Michelle Keever, and Joe Aylor receive the VPPPA Innovation Award at the VPPPA Safety+ symposium. Image courtesy of UCOR

OAK RIDGE, TN – UCOR’s ability to conduct high-hazard work safely has again received national recognition. At its Safety+ Symposium awards reception in Nashville on Monday, the Voluntary Protection Participants’ Association (VPPPA) presented UCOR with the 2021 Innovation Award. This Innovation Award is the third one that UCOR, an Amentum-led partnership with Jacobs, has received since 2017. This year’s award recognized the company’s outstanding training, qualification, and professional development programs in radiological control, industrial hygiene, and construction and heavy equipment.

“UCOR is constantly looking for ways to enhance safety performance and stands as an example of what a committed and safety-conscious workforce can do,” said Clint Wolfley, UCOR Safety Systems and Services Manager. “We will continue to explore and implement innovations in our training and safety program innovations to ensure our workforce goes home at the end of each workday in the same safe condition they arrived.”

UCOR’s new in-house training program for radiological control technicians (RCTs) has produced 160 new RCTs through a 16-week program with classroom and on-the-job training. This training uses cutting-edge electronic instruments and technologies that allow students to master skills in a hazard-free, practical lab environment. The new RCTs also received Hazardous Waste Operations Emergency Response, Asbestos Worker, and other training so that they can seamlessly rotate between diverse UCOR projects with radiological contamination.

A rigorous industrial hygiene technician (IHT) training program produced excellent results in 2020, with UCOR recording zero unprotected exceedances of occupational exposure limits for the more than 11,000 hazardous or toxic materials samples analyzed. The program includes industrial hygiene fundamentals, practical applications, and on-the-job learning experiences. Technicians follow an industrial hygiene career-progression plan for professional development. The program includes mandatory attendance at monthly industrial hygiene training sessions to enhance both technical and leadership skills.

UCOR’s field-centric Construction and Heavy Equipment (CHE) Program continues to share best practices nationally with DOE, other government agencies, and the private sector. The CHE Program has benefited from implementing a revised training curriculum to enhance conduct of operations and programs to strengthen critical-thinking skills. One innovation is the upcoming implementation of a first-of-its-kind virtual reality training experience that UCOR helped develop.

UCOR is a leader in professional development efforts for our safety professionals. The company boasts 212 Board of Certified Safety Professionals (BCSP) Safety Trained Supervisor Construction (STSC) certification holders among its workforce. This amount comprises approximately 70% of all STSC certified individuals in Tennessee. Members of the UCOR workforce also hold advanced BCSP certifications, which include 27 Certified Safety Professionals, nine Certified Industrial Hygienists, three Certified Health Physicists, and five Safety Management Specialists.

UCOR is the DOE Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management’s lead environmental cleanup partner. After safely removing the last of the legacy facilities from East Tennessee Technology Park (ETTP)—the former Oak Ridge Gaseous Diffusion Plant—the company’s highly trained workforce is removing unused, contaminated facilities at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Y-12 National Security Complex, while continuing remedial actions at ETTP. UCOR’s more than 1,900 workers are dedicated to safely reducing environmental risk and helping the DOE Office of Science and the National Nuclear Security Administration to continue their missions. Learn more about the company at UCOR.com.






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