I talk a lot about owning the standard, but owning it means more than meeting the expectations in front of us. It means looking for ways to make the people around us better. It means seeing something that can be safer, more efficient, or more effective and having the ownership to improve it. That is what it means to be a force multiplier, and that is what I expect from every person on this team. When I look back at FY 2026, I see what happens when that mindset becomes the backbone of how we work.
Our craft workforce performed nearly 1.3 million safe craft hours this year, and what stands out to me is what our teams accomplished during those hours. At Heritage Center, more than 91,000 safe craft hours helped us continue reducing permits and DOE liability as we move closer to our cleanup end state. That progress may look differently from tearing down a building, but it is just as important. It means we are finishing what we started and leaving DOE with fewer legacy obligations to manage.
That same ownership is keeping our mission moving in Nuclear Operations. Nearly 410,000 safe craft hours went into maintaining critical facilities, extending their service lives and making sure the infrastructure our workforce depends on remains available. Sometimes owning the standard means demolishing what is no longer needed. Other times, it means taking care of what we still need and finding ways to make it serve the mission longer.
You can see both sides of that at ORNL. Crews performed more than 375,000 safe craft hours while pushing Isotope Row closer to the finish line. Facilities that stood for decades are disappearing because people across this organization planned the work, challenged themselves to improve it, and then safely executed it.
Every building we take down creates another challenge: safely managing what comes out of it. Waste Operations supported our projects while performing more than 117,000 safe craft hours and helping manage more than 50 million pounds of demolition waste generated across the reservation. At Y-12, more than 300,000 safe craft hours accompanied the completion of Alpha-2 demolition and continued progress at the Old Steam Plant, where demolition is approaching the halfway point.
Think about what those numbers represent together. Nearly 1.3 million safe craft hours while we accelerated cleanup across every part of our mission. We did not lower our expectations to accomplish more work. We relied on those expectations to accomplish it. That is the culture I want us to protect. We set a high bar, we find ways to raise it, and then we hold ourselves accountable for meeting it.
Others are taking notice. This year, UCOR earned its seventh consecutive VPPPA Innovation Award, the TAUC Joseph R. La Rocca Union Project of the Year Award for Alpha-2, and the Thomas J. Reynolds Safety Award. Cole Ayres was named a National Safety Council Rising Star of Safety, and Mel McKenzie received the VPPPA Emerging Safety Leadership Excellence Award. I am proud of every one of those recognitions, but I am even prouder of what they represent: people on this team refusing to settle for good enough and finding ways to make the work around them better.
Now we have to carry that forward into FY 2027. The cleanup ahead of us will be every bit as challenging, and demolition is not slowing down. Neither can we. Keep asking questions. Keep looking out for one another. Keep finding the better way. And never underestimate how much your individual actions can influence the people and work around you.
Be the force multiplier that raises the standard for everyone around you. When each of us do that, we don’t just meet the standard—we own it.
