A message from Ken Rueter – Farewell

First, thank you. I am deeply grateful for the privilege of serving alongside you for more than 15 years. You show up every day to do hard, high-hazard, consequential work the right way—protecting people, protecting the environment, and delivering for our DOE customer and the communities we serve. Leading this team has been one of the greatest honors of my career.

If I had to capture what makes UCOR exceptional, it fits the Golden Circle—our Why, How, and What.

WHY 

We do this work because cleanup is not simply about finishing projects—it’s about making a safer tomorrow possible. “Cleanup Today for a Nuclear Tomorrow” reflects a belief that we can eliminate legacy risk while enabling enduring missions and a stronger nuclear future for a clean, resilient, and competitive America.

It is also a belief in people: that this mission can be a pathway to the middle class for Tennesseans—especially those from rural and underserved counties—through skilled trades, technical careers, and professional roles that matter, make a true impact, and last for generations.

HOW 

We deliver that WHY through our Shared Governance operating model. We bring the workforce to the table. We listen to the people closest to the work. We build ownership in decisions. We make safety a prerequisite—every task, every time—because production without protection is not success.

And we hold ourselves to a delivery discipline that is as simple as it is demanding: capture the work, build what we sold, finish what we start, and tell our story with clarity and credibility.

WHAT 

The results speak for themselves—not because the numbers are the purpose, but because they prove the purpose. Together, you’ve achieved what many thought couldn’t be done: completing historic cleanup safely, ahead of schedule, and under budget; reducing taxpayer liability; transferring land for reuse; supporting conservation and preservation; and helping establish Oak Ridge as the nation’s leading nuclear lifecycle innovation campus. You’ve helped reshape how the country thinks about what environmental cleanup can unlock.

Now for the charge—drawn from Simon Sinek’s Start with Why and from what I’ve learned here at UCOR:

When the WHY gets fuzzy, organizations start managing the scoreboard instead of the mission. We can become fluent in metrics and deadlines and forget the purpose that earned trust in the first place. Guard against that. Keep our WHY explicit—in planning, in pre-job briefs, in leadership messages, and in how we talk to each other. Make sure every “what” has a clear line back to “why.”

And during leadership transitions, things can fracture if the WHY is treated like a personality instead of a culture. Our Culture of Excellence and Caring cannot depend on one leader. It must live in habits: safety as a prerequisite, a questioning attitude, risk recognition and mitigation, cross-functional problem solving, disciplined capture and execution, respect for craft and labor expertise, and keeping people at the center of decisions.

If you do those two things—keep the WHY sharp and keep Shared Governance real—UCOR will continue to lead this industry long after any one of us has moved on.

Thank you for your professionalism, your grit, your care for one another, and your commitment to doing work that matters. Team UCOR is one of the best in the business, and I will always be proud to have served with you—and proud of the history you have made.

“Cleanup Today for a Nuclear Tomorrow”

With respect and gratitude, 

Ken Rueter
Executive Board Director

Note: you can watch Ken’s recent appearance on the podcast “Gone Fission“.