The story “Final plaintiff settles Oak Ridge National Lab COVID vax case” [Weapons Complex Morning Briefing, April, 17, 2024] should have said Jessica Bilyeu is a current employee of UT-Battelle and her husband Jeffrey Bilyeu’s request for a religious accommodation was approved.
Local officials in Western Kentucky said Wednesday the Department of Energy is picking up its remaining two-year option on its Deactivation and Remediation Contract with Jacobs-led Four River Nuclear Partnership at the Paducah Site.
Four Rivers, a joint venture that also includes Fluor and BWX Technologies, currently has a $1.7-billion contract that started in June 2017 and is set to run through June 20, 2025.
The two-year option period’s value “is estimated to be more than $300 million over 2026 and 2027,” according to a Wednesday press release issued by Paducah Mayor George Bray and McCracken County Judge Executive Craig Clymer.
DOE picked up the three-year option in 2022. The additional option would round out the 10-year contract term.
The Department of Energy has approved its latest jumbo-sized saltstone disposal unit for operation at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, the agency said Tuesday.
Saltstone Disposal Unit 9 (SDU 9) is the fourth such mega unit built at Savannah River to hold up to 33 million gallons of saltstone, DOE said in a press release. SDU 8 was approved by DOE last July. The saltstone is separated from liquid radioactive waste that is treated elsewhere on site.
BWX Technologies-led Savannah River Mission Completion is building SDU 10 while sites have been prepared for SDUs 11 and 12. Mud mat construction for SDU 11 was to begin this year, according to the press release. The SDUs receive a cement-like grout from Saltstone Production Facility.
DOE’s fiscal 2025 budget request zeros out construction funding for SDUs 8 and 9 at Savannah River, which was enacted for about $32 million in fiscal 2024. The request also seeks $83 million for disposal units 10, 11 and 12, which were budgeted at $56 million in fiscal 2024.
The Savannah River Site is working through about 35 million gallons of high-level radioactive liquid waste stored in underground tanks, according to the state Department of Health and Environmental Control. The waste is a byproduct from decades of processing nuclear materials for nuclear weapons.
Sen. Shelley Capito (R-W.Va.) brought a list of old grievances to NRC Chair Christopher Hanson’s renomination hearing on Wednesday, setting the stage for a contentious process with time running short.
Hanson’s term runs through June 30, and his quickest road to renomination, unanimous consent on the Senate floor, might prove impassable if Capito and all her Republican colleagues in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee oppose Hanson.
In Wednesday’s hearing, Committee Chair Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) said that “Chair Hanson is the right person for the job at this time” and that “I hope to work with members of this Committee to expeditiously move his nomination through the confirmation process.”
But Capito showed no sign that she would be quickly won over.
Capito grilled Hanson about what she perceived to be his lack of support for more in-office work in the post-pandemic era and about a vote in which he sided with now-former-Commission Jeffrey Baran to require more thorough environmental reviews for relicensing nuclear power plants.
Baran, renominated last year but not reconfirmed, became a sort of notch in Senate Republicans’ belt after a sustained campaign of GOP resistance succeeded in painting him as an unrepentant obstructionist of nuclear progress unsuited to shepherding in a new nuclear renaissance.
In 2022, Hanson voted with Biden to revoke license renewals for two operating nuclear power plants and prevent the rapid relicensing of three others. That overturned a decision by the Donald Trump administration’s NRC that the renewals should proceed.
Two-and-a-half years later, the decision grates on Capito, who on Wednesday asked Hanson to explain himself.
Hanson said he was playing a long game with his vote, looking out for those five NRC licensees and others in the future who, he believed, could have had license renewal requests held up in court for violating the federal environmental and administrative law.
“[W]e were going to get sued and the people who sued us were going to win,” Hanson told Capito. “[I]t was better to fix that now than to get 10 or 12 or 15 licenses down the road and have a federal court overturn us.”
Hanson did acknowledge, however, that none of the five plants affected by the 2022 vote had had their licenses renewed as of Wednesday.
“This kind of gets to the point,” Capito said of the lack of renewal, to date, for the five licensees.
Also at the hearing, Capito hammered home her disagreement with Hanson’s vote last year to let the NRC’s senior most civil servant set telework policy for the agency. Hanson was the only member of the commission at the time who opposed allowing the commissioners themselves, at least in this instance, to dictate the policy.
As a result of that vote, most NRC employees with a two-week paycheck were allowed a maximum of three telework days weekly rather than the four they had been eligible for under another a telework policy approved by the commission’s executive director of operations, the top career official.
“This lack of in-person interaction in the workplace, obviously an outgrowth of COVID, has had impacts,” said Capito.
“Nobody’s coming back to work,” Capito said. “They’re not coming back to work full time.”
The Savannah River Site in South Carolina will produce at least half the plutonium pits for the Navy’s W93 warhead after the facility opens next decade, a federal official said Wednesday.
“We don’t think we can get that facility up in time to do all of the W93 builds, but it’s important that we have a fair number of those new pits,” Jill Hruby, administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) said in a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing Monday.
Without new pits for W93, NNSA’s other option is “to reuse pits, which introduces some uncertainty but more importantly … it limits what else we can do in our stockpile when we reuse those pits,” Hruby said.
The NNSA administrator’s testimony, in response to a question from Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), confirms that the W93, the warhead for a planned submarine-launched ballistic missile that will replace the Trident II-D5 some time next decade, will get new pits.
Hruby testified in the Wednesday morning hearing alongside Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm.
NNSA notionally plans to produce its first proof-of-concept W93 warhead in the mid-2030s, right around the time Hruby forecast the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility would open.
According to NNSA’s fiscal year 2025 budget request, the agency planned to complete W93’s Weapon Design and Cost Report, which includes rough cost and schedule estimates, in fiscal year 2026 and stage test flights of the weapon between fiscal years 2027 and 2029. The agency requested more than $455 million for W93 for 2025.
The Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility, the larger of NNSA’s two planned pit factories, should be finished in 2032, Hruby said Wednesday, but it will take “a few more years” after that before the facility is ready to cast plutonium pits, the fissile cores of a thermonuclear weapon’s first stage.
In its 2025 budget request, the NNSA said the Savannah River pit plant could cost as much as $25 billion to build. That’s more than twice as high as the agency’s top-end estimate from a year ago. The agency planned to create a formal cost and schedule baseline for the facility in fiscal year 2026, according to the 2025 request.
The NNSA’s other plutonium pit factory will be at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, which will initially manufacture new pits for the W87-1 warhead to be used on future Sentinel missiles, the Air Force’s next silo-based intercontinental ballistic missile and a replacement for the service’s current Minuteman III missiles.
Los Alamos will start making pits for W87-1 warheads this year and ramp up to 30 annually by 2028, Hruby said Wednesday.
Strategic Management Solutions, a small contractor for the Department of Energy and its National Nuclear Security Administration, has been acquired by a Louisiana-based private equity management firm led by a former Shaw Group executive.
The purchase of Strategic Management Solutions, LLC (SMSI) was announced Tuesday in a press release by Bernhard Capital Partners. The buyer is based in Baton Rouge, La., and its founding partner is Jim Bernhard, former president and chairman of the Shaw Group.
SMSI, founded in 1999 and based in Albuquerque, N.M., is being folded into Bernhard’s DOE portfolio, according to the release. Terms of the deal were not released.
“I am confident that, as part of this best-in-class platform, we will capitalize on a number of exciting opportunities to continue to grow our business and expand the support we provide for customers, all while maintaining our unique corporate culture and professional ethics,” SMSI Founder and Chairman Lee Bernstein said in the release.
SMSI is the third contractor for the DOE weapons complex to be bought by the Bernhard Capital Partners services platform, according to the release. The other two are Boston Government Services and Sterling Engineering & Consulting Group.
David O’Flynn, SMSI’s chief executive officer, will take an executive director post for the Bernhard DOE platform, according to the release.
“We are pleased to join Bernhard Capital’s dedicated DOE platform and are excited to work together and build on SMSI’s momentum and reputation as a partner of choice for customers within the DOE, NNSA and other federal markets,” O’Flynn said in the release.
The National Nuclear Security Administration seeks $70 million for a sea-launched cruise missile warhead for fiscal year 2025 as part of the agency’s list of unfunded priorities, a lawmaker said Wednesday.
Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm acknowledged at the start of a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee that the weapon was among the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) unfunded priorities for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, but Sen. Debra Fischer (R-N.D.) quantified the funding the NNSA seeks.
The NNSA did not include the sea-launched warhead in its 2025 budget request, released in March, because the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, which required the agency to work on the warhead, was signed in late December, too late for the agency to reformulate its budget request to include the warhead, Granholm said testified Tuesday.
So, Granholm said, the weapon landed on NNSA’s unfunded priorities list, a usually private document agencies share with Congress between the publication of their budget requests and the writing of a budget bill.
Meanwhile, NNSA Administrator Jill Hruby said during Wednesday’s hearing, where she was the only other witness, the tip of the sea-launched cruise missile warhead might not be a variant of the W80-4 air-launched cruise missile warhead.
“[W]e’re also looking at other options that might, might, we don’t know yet, be simpler to do without disrupting our current production flow,” Hruby said.
That would be a major deviation compared with prior public statements from the NNSA, and with the requirements Congress has set.
Federal and state agencies could soon provide details about a new conceptual agreement for cleanup at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), said Tuesday.
Cantwell spoke during a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing on DOE’s fiscal 2025 budget request. The conceptual agreement, announced in May 2023, followed about three years of discussions after the state threatened legal action over Hanford cleanup.
“In a couple of weeks,” DOE, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Washington state Department of Ecology “will be announcing a conclusion of holistic negotiations to update the consent decree,” Cantwell said at the hearing.
“And you know how important that Tri-Party Agreement is” for cleaning up 56 million gallons of radioactive waste at Hanford, Cantwell said to Secretary of Energy Granholm, the hearing’s sole witness. The agreement was reached in 1989 by the agencies to guide Hanford cleanup.
At the hearing, Cantwell sought Granholm’s commitment that the revised cleanup plans “will have milestones” with an opportunity for public comment.
“Yes, it’s exciting they are reaching a conclusion,” Granholm said, adding “obviously” DOE will work with the community to make sure the milestone process is transparent.
Also at the hearing, Granholm said the agency will soon be transferring 150 acres of Hanford land to Tri-Cities governments for economic development.
In another facet of site reuse, Granholm said DOE is soliciting for clean energy developers to provide 200 megawatts or more of carbon-free electricity at Hanford. The agency is evaluating those proposals, the secretary said.
In her written testimony, Granholm said the Joe Biden administration is seeking $8.2 billion for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, which would be less than the 2024 level of $8.5 billion for cleanup of Cold War and Manhattan Project sites.
As it often does, the biggest single chunk, $3.1 billion, would go to Hanford, the former plutonium production complex. Next year, Hanford is expected to start converting some of the less radioactive tank waste into a solid glass form at the Bechtel-built Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant.
Nuclear weapons and nuclear power are on the hearing docket Wednesday morning in the Senate, while one scheduled hearing slipped off.
The Senate Armed Services Committee has moved the open portion of its hearing about the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) fiscal year 2025 budget request up half an hour, to 9:00 p.m. Eastern time. The hearing, which was to stream online, had been scheduled to begin at 9:30 a.m.
Next, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee was to gavel in at 10:00 a.m. Eastern time to consider the renomination of Christopher Hanson as a member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Hanson, the chair, is serving out a term that expires June 30.
Last, a second NNSA hearing scheduled for today was canceled. The Senate Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee was to hear testimony from the semiautonomous Department of Energy agency at 4:15 p.m. Eastern time but decided to postpone the hearing. The subcommittee had not announced a makeup date as of Wednesday morning.
In a Tuesday hearing, Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) requested, but did not get, a promise from the Secretary of Energy that President Joe Biden (D) would follow rules in a House-passed bill if his administration bans imports of Russian uranium.
“If the administration does impose its own ban on Russian uranium imports, will you commit to adhere to the same limits and conditions and terms as found in the legislation … that’s passed the House?” Barrasso asked Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm during a hearing in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee about DOE’s 2025 budget request.
Barrasso referred to H.R.1042, the Prohibiting Russian Uranium Imports Act, which passed the full House unanimously in December on a voice vote. The bill would make imports of Russian uranium, still the major source of fuel for U.S. nuclear reactors, illegal by 2028.
Answering Barrasso, Granholm said “[w]e would abide whatever Congress passes, of course.” But as of Tuesday, the Senate, where some lawmakers have written their own bill to ban Russian uranium, had yet to give the House bill a hearing, let alone a vote.
A DOE spokesperson did not immediately reply to a request to clarify Granholm’s remarks to Barrasso.
The Biden administration as of Tuesday had not announced plans for a ban on Russian uranium, and Granholm told Barrasso during the hearing that she would prefer a new law to an executive ban.
“I agree with you,” Barrasso replied. “And I think so do the American nuclear fuel suppliers.”
Under the House-passed H.R. 1042, the Department of Energy could issue temporary waivers to companies that wish to continue imports until 2028.
That’s much more leeway than the Senate-authored S. 452, the Nuclear Fuel Security Act of 2023, would give. That bill, which Barrasso cosponsored but which the Senate has not voted on, would ban Russian uranium imports within a few months of becoming law.
Centrus Energy Corp., the former U.S. Enrichment Corp., is among the brokers of Russian uranium to U.S. nuclear power plant operators.
Imports of Russian uranium have largely continued for two years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but lawmakers’ patience in the 118th Congress ran out.
Last year, some Democrats resisted banning Russian imports before Congress provided the billions of dollars Biden administration said was a prerequisite for going cold turkey on Russia. Eventually, though after the unanimous passage of H.R. 1042, most of that aid arrived as part of the bill that provided DOE’s budget for 2024.