Innovator of the Year
Jeff Colfer was not recognized for a single innovation. Rather, his spirit of innovation is what brought him to the attention of the Innovation Council. In this creative thinker’s mind, there’s a difference between a good idea and one that can be translated into a great opportunity. “Sometimes you see a problem that just cries out to be fixed,” he says. “It may save the Company just $25 a year, or it could save tens of thousands of dollars.” And that, he says, represents the power and potential of the Innovation Program. “As an individual, you may not always have the opportunity to promote the best cost savings ideas,” he explains. “But as a Council, you can put serious attention on the ideas that offer huge savings and improvement.” If an idea is easy to implement, he continues, “the Council approach enables it to spread quickly throughout the Company.”

Innovation of the Year
Jeff Dickinson oversees such instrumentation activities as calibration, maintenance, and repair of radiation detection instrumentation. In processing large amounts of debris from facility decommissioning, an essential but costly and time-consuming first step used to be proving that much of it could be safely dispositioned under less stringent controls. Jeff’s work changed that. He was recognized for the design, development, licensing, and implementation of a large container bulk waste assay system, named GARDIAN (GAmma Radiation Detection and In-Container ANalysis). Using GARDIAN, large containers of waste are driven between two mobile trailers containing detection instruments and other equipment. “GARDIAN allows larger containers of waste to be assayed quickly and flexibly,” he says, “which improves processing efficiency and reduces the cutting and sizing otherwise required.”