March 29, 2024

Dispute over $45B Hanford tank contract resumes in appeals court

By Wayne Barber

Contractors and the U.S. Department of Justice filed extensive legal arguments in federal appeals court last week in a dispute over a Department of Energy liquid waste contract potentially worth $45 billion over a decade at the Hanford Site in Washington state.

Two teams, one headed by BWX Technologies and another by AtkinsRéalis Nuclear, have together with the government, filed more than 150 pages of legal papers with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, since March 18.

The losing bidder — both in the original April 2023 award and the agency’s more recent Feb. 29 re-award — is Hanford Tank Disposition Alliance. The Alliance is a team of Atkins, Jacobs and Westinghouse. 

In its March 18 filing, the Atkins team says U.S. Court of Federal Claims Judge Marian Blank Horn was correct in ruling  last June that BWXT-led Hanford Tank Waste Operations & Closure was ineligible for the contract due to failure to stay registered in a federal procurement tracking system. The legal dispute concerns only the first DOE award from 2023, not the re-award from last month.

DOE on Feb. 29 announced it would re-award the Hanford Integrated Tank Disposition Contract to the BWX Technologies-led group, Hanford Tank Waste Operations & Closure. The joint venture, which also includes Amentum and Fluor, has in past filings said its failure to stay registered with the System for Award Management (sam.gov) is a mere technical error and not a fatal flaw.

A DOE contracting officer in October 2023 agreed the lapse in registration was a fixable mistake.

“DOE’s evaluation of the two proposals was very close,” said the AtkinsRéalis-led group.  The actual contract prices are confidential, according to the filing. But the Court of Federal Claims “has already correctly determined that HTDA [Hanford Tank Disposition Alliance] succeeded on the merits, according to the Alliance.

The AtkinsRéalis-led group goes on to say it “would lose the reasonable opportunity to compete fairly for the contract” if BWXT-led Hanford Tank Waste Operations and Closure is allowed to keep the liquid waste contract. 

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March 29, 2024

White House seeks $47.2M for DNFSB in fiscal 2025

By ExchangeMonitor

President Joe Biden requested $47.2 million for the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board for the 2025 fiscal year starting Oct, 1, or $5.2 million than the $42 million recently appropriated by congress for the small watchdog agency in fiscal 2024.

The White House requested the $47.2 million and the equivalent of 128 full-time staff positions, about equal to current staffing, according to the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) combined 2025 budget justification and 2023 performance report. The DNFSB document was published earlier this month.

Before the compromise 2024 spending package passed earlier in March, DNFSB like the rest of the government, was operating under a continuing resolution. That resolution kept DNFSB at the fiscal 2023 level of $41 million, according to the DNFSB annual report.

There would be a civilian pay increase of 2% in January 2025, according to the DNFSB document. The board requests $1.1 million to support the official travel of board members and staff.

Congress established DNFSB in 1988 as an independent executive branch agency charged with providing outside analysis and safety recommendations to the secretary of energy for nuclear defense sites.

The board is set up as a five-member panel, although it currently has only two: Chair Joyce Connery, whose term ends Oct. 18, and vice chair Thomas Summers, whose term ends in October 2025. A potential third member, Patricia Lee, has won the endorsement of the Senate Armed Services Committee but has yet to receive a vote in the full Senate.

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March 29, 2024

NRC staff think they can finish one Holtec license amendment request to restart Palisades by March ‘25

By Dan Leone

Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff need a little less than a year to review a request for a license amendment Holtec needs to restart Michigan’s Palisades Nuclear Generating Station, according to a letter published Tuesday.

“With respect to your requested completion schedule of March 15, 2025, the NRC staff believes that it will complete the safety review by then,” reads the letter to Jean Fleming, Holtec’s vice president of licensing and regulatory affairs from Justin Poole, NRC project manager for Plant Licensing Branch III in the Division of Operating Reactor Licensing in the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation.

The letter was dated March 18 and published online by NRC on Tuesday. Holtec, Jupiter, Fla., wants to restart Palisades in August 2025. To do that, the company needs the NRC to amend the plant’s operating license to remove a clause that forbids refueling of the reactor.

The clause is a standard addition to any operating license for a plant that has moved into the decommissioning phase of its life. Removing the clause would be an unprecedented action for the NRC, but it would not be the only NRC action required for the restart.

When it applied for this particular license amendment in February, Holtec repeated what it has said since the state of Michigan and Covert, Mich., locals agreed to attempt to reopen the plant: that the Jupiter, Fla., company had done “[n]o major decommissioning activities” at Palisades.

Though getting permission to reload the Palisades reactor is the biggest regulatory hurdle standing in the way of a Palisades restart, there are others. These include multiple “future requests for license amendments” aside from the one NRC corresponded with Holtec about on the 18th, according to Poole’s letter

Taken together, all the looming license amendment requests might prompt the NRC to conduct new environmental reviews of the Palisades site to see what effects a plant restart could have on the shores of Lake Michigan, the lake itself, and wildlife around the plant, Poole wrote.

Meanwhile, Holtec this week took a major step towards financing the restart, netting a conditional loan commitment of $1.5 billion from the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office.

The single most expensive item Holtec needs to install at Palisades is a new steam generator that will cost about $510 million, according to a grant application obtained this year by an antinuclear group through a Freedom of Information Act request.

 

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March 29, 2024

Hanford landlord asks court to throw out Justice Department False Claims Act case

By Wayne Barber

The Leidos-led landlord at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site asked a federal court in Washington state Monday to throw out litigation by the Department of Justice and a whistleblower alleging the contractor padded its fire safety bills to the government by millions of dollars.

The contractor, which has a 10-year contract now worth $4 billion for infrastructure and site services, denies its staff engaged in a scheme to bill DOE for unworked hours. The contractor also denies its managers knew about any such scheme.

Hanford Mission Integration Solutions, made up of Leidos, Centerra and Parsons, “denies that the complaint states any valid, actionable claim under the False Claims Act or for breach of contract,” according to the answer filed Monday in U.S. District Court for Eastern Washington.

Further, the contractor argues the complaint fails to state a claim for which relief can be granted. Also, “the government would be unjustly enriched if allowed to recover” the damages alleged in the complaint.

In addition, the contract asserts DOE had all the material relating to Hanford Mission Integration Solutions’ performance “and DOE nonetheless continued to pay” for services provided.

The Justice Department case, based partly on previously sealed allegations by a whistleblower, has been percolating since 2021, but only became public in January with the filing of a public complaint through the U.S. attorney’s office in Eastern Washington.

The Justice Department alleges Hanford Mission Integration Solutions not only billed for unworked hours but failed to ensure fire safety equipment worked.

The joint-venture in its reply denies it “could perform internal pipe inspections of fire suppression systems before such work was authorized and funded by DOE.” The contractor also denies for years it failed to properly plan and schedule fire protection work for hourly workers. Hanford Mission also denies it instructed employees to bill for hours of idle time.

In the last fee scorecard from DOE, Hanford Mission received only 35% of its subjective fee. This Hanford Mission contract was awarded in December 2019 and has a five-year base period that runs through Aug.16, 2025, with one three-year option and one two-year option.

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March 29, 2024

White House nominates Hanson for five more years at NRC

By ExchangeMonitor

The White House last week nominated incumbent chairman Christopher Hansen to serve another term as a member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

If confirmed by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, which had not scheduled a hearing on the renomination at deadline, Hanson would remain at the NRC through June 29, 2029.

Hanson’s current term expires June 29. He was appointed chair of the commission only five days after President Joe Biden’s (D) inauguration, about eight months after he was confirmed in May 2020 during in the final months of President Donald Trump’s (R) first term.

Hanson is serving out the remainder of the term of Stephen Burns, who resigned in April 2019.

Prior to the commission, Hanson spent five years as Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-Calif.) staffer on the Senate Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee. Feinstein, who chaired the committee, died in September.

Before his stint as a Senate staffer, Hanson was a policy advisor in the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy. Before that, he was a consultant for Booz Allen Hamilton. He has master’s degrees from Yale Divinity School and Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, with a focus on ethics and natural resource economics.

If the Senate, in an election year, does not approve Hanson’s reappointment, the NRC, already lacking its full complement of five members, would drop to three members: two Republicans and a Democrat.

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March 29, 2024

Second minibus bill signed; has Price-Anderson extension; 2024 federal budgets set

By ExchangeMonitor

President Joe Biden (D) on Saturday signed a package of appropriations bills that fund the Department of Defense and other agencies through Sept. 30 and extended a key federal nuclear indemnity program.

The bill extended Price-Anderson protections for Department of Energy contractors and commercial nuclear companies to Dec. 31, 2065 from Dec. 31, 2025 and quadrupled the financial protection the federal government must provide to these companies for nuclear incidents that occur outside the U.S.

Sens. Tom Carper (D-Del.) and Shelley Capito (R-W.Va.), the chair and ranking member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, included the Price-Anderson extension in the 1,000-plus-page spending bill.

The Department of Energy and the rest of the federal government now has stable funding for the remainder of the 2024 fiscal year, which ends Oct. 1. DOE’s final 2024 budget was part of a separate package of six appropriations bills that Biden signed on March 9.

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March 29, 2024

Another spending package passes without radiation act extension

By ExchangeMonitor

Although congress passed and President Joe Biden signed a major fiscal 2024 appropriations bill over the weekend, it did not include an extension of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), said via social media.

“Total failure,” Hawley said last on the website X after learning the radiation compensation extension would not make it into the spending bill. “Politicians have talked like this for decades. While doing nothing. The time to talk is over. The time to ACT is now. Put RECA on the floor and vote on it.”

The Senate has passed a Hawley-backed bill to extend the radiation worker compensation bill that would otherwise expire in June. Hawley earlier tried unsuccessfully to attach the extension to the must-pass National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2024.

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March 29, 2024

Fired worker tells Sixth Circuit UCOR lacks sovereign immunity

By Wayne Barber

A former radiation technician fired after refusing to take the COVID-19 vaccine told a federal appeals court last week the Department of Energy’s environmental prime at Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee is not entitled to sovereign immunity.

In a legal brief filed March 19, lawyers for Yolonda Riggs, told the Sixth U.S. Court of Appeals that UCOR, an Amentum-Jacobs partnership, is not immune from Riggs’ wrongful termination lawsuit. Riggs was fired in January 2022 after refusing vaccination, citing religious beliefs.

“Ms. Riggs does not contest that the government validly conferred upon UCOR the authority to manage and operate the Oak Ridge Cleanup project,” according to the document. But the government “did not confer authority upon UCOR to implement a vaccine mandate.”

“It is far-fetched for UCOR to argue that it was authorized, and indeed, mandated by a July 2010 contract to implement a vaccine mandate to fight against COVID-19, a pandemic that did not enter the public lexicon until 2020,” according to the Riggs brief.

In its filing in February, UCOR said days after the Biden executive order, the Safer Federal Workforce Task Force issued its initial guidance for federal contractors and subcontractors. The guidance said contractors must “ensure that all covered contractor employees are fully vaccinated for COVID-19, unless the employee is legally entitled to an accommodation.” The task force set a deadline of Dec. 8, 2021, which was later extended to Jan. 18, 2022. The guidance was not lifted until May 2023. 

UCOR has argued it is immune from the lawsuit, saying it was following President Joe Biden’s executive order 14042, the COVID-19 federal contractor mandate in September 2021. Riggs’ attorneys, however, say any immunity is not absolute — because the cleanup contract explicitly says UCOR will comply with Tennessee law.

In November 2021 the Tennessee General Assembly passed a law blocking various private and government entities from compelling workers to provide proof of vaccination in order to keep a job. The vaccination mandate announced by UCOR president Ken Rueter in August 2021, however, said workers must “provide proof” of vaccination.  

UCOR operated without any mandate from the start of the pandemic in early 2020 until November 2021, “and there is no reason it could not have accommodated Ms. Riggs (and complied with Tennessee law) by continued use of alternative measures,” according to the brief. Measures such as remote work, physical distance, frequent testing and mandatory masking, were used at various times by UCOR.

“UCOR cannot have it both ways—either UCOR was in violation of the contract if allowed employees to remain unvaccinated or it was not,” according to the Riggs brief. “The fact that UCOR allowed some employees to remain unvaccinated contradicts its argument that it would be in violation of the contract if it did not mandate vaccines.”

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March 29, 2024

Round up: Michigan nuclear legislation; Sellafield skip; New NRC nuke guy in Massachusetts; more

By ExchangeMonitor

Michigan state Rep. Graham Filler (R) last week unveiled a bill to promote development of advanced nuclear reactors in the state. 

The measure has 24 co-sponsors and would change Michigan law to adapt the federal definition of advanced nuclear reactors into the state’s laws and legally define the phrase “advanced nuclear reactor technologies” as any that have “significant improvements, including additional inherent safety features, compared to reactors operating before January 1, 2016, in the United States.

 

Sellafield Ltd., removed a zeolite skip from the Sellafield site’s first generation Magnox storage pond, according to a press release issues this week by the U.K. government-owned company, which is cleaning up the British nuclear site near the city of Seascale on the Irish-sea coast of Cumbria, England. The pond stores fuel from the U.K.’s Magnox reactors, versions of which operated between the 1950s and 2015.

The skips are containers filled with the mineral zeolite, which can absorb radioactive particles. There are more than 230 additional skips left in the pond and all of them must be removed so that Sellafield Ltd. can clean up radioactive sludge that has settled on the bottom of the ponds, according to a video that the company, a subsidiary of the U.K.-owned Nuclear Decommission Authority, posted on YouTube.

 

David Bryant, is Massachusetts’ new state liaison officer to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healy wrote in a March 14 letter to the NRC, which the commission published online this week.

Bryant is the assistant director for planning and preparedness at the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency. State liaison officers are a state’s first point of contact with the NRC. The commission’s Office of Nuclear Materials Safety and Safeguards runs the state liaison program.

 

Krishna Singh, president and CEO of Holtec International, was one of four people recognized on March 22 for their achievements as members of the Indian diaspora from the eastern Indian state of Bihar, on the country’s northern border with Tibet and just west of Bangladesh.

The Bihar Foundation East Coast Chapter of the U.S. wrote about the awards on the website X. The foundation presented the awards at an event held in New York at the Consulate General of India.

 

Precedent-setting antinuclear attorney Diane Curran, who is representing environmental and antinuclear groups in several pending lawsuits about nuclear power plants and radioactive waste storage, celebrates her birthday March 29, according to San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace, one of Curran’s clients.

Curran is involved with lawsuits against both the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant in San Luis Obispo County in California and a proposed interim storage facility for commercial spent nuclear fuel planned by Holtec International in eastern New Mexico.

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March 29, 2024

Second minibus bill signed; has Price-Anderson extension; 2024 federal budgets set

By ExchangeMonitor

President Joe Biden (D) on Saturday signed a package of appropriations bills that fund the Department of Defense and other agencies through Sept. 30 and extended a key federal nuclear indemnity program.

The bill extended Price-Anderson protections for Department of Energy contractors and commercial nuclear companies to Dec. 31, 2065 from Dec. 31, 2025 and quadrupled the financial protection the federal government must provide to these companies for nuclear incidents that occur outside the U.S.

Sens. Tom Carper (D-Del.) and Shelley Capito (R-W.Va.), the chair and ranking member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, included the Price-Anderson extension in the 1,000-plus-page spending bill.

The Department of Energy and the rest of the federal government now has stable funding for the remainder of the 2024 fiscal year, which ends Oct. 1. DOE’s final 2024 budget was part of a separate package of six appropriations bills that Biden signed on March 9.

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