Office of Environmental Management (EM)

The Department of Energy Thursday announced plans to solicit Technical Assistance Contracts for several Office of Environmental Management Field Sites within the next 60 days. Requests for proposals could be released by early to mid-March for small business set-aside contracts at the West Valley Demonstration Project in New York, the Moab Uranium Mill Tailings Remedial […]

The Department of Energy could solicit bids for long-term management and storage of elemental mercury in January, the Office of Environmental Management said in a procurement update after Christmas. After court action by gold mining companies forced DOE to drop earlier plans to designate Waste Control Specialists in West Texas as its preferred long-term storage […]

Department of Energy management at the Hanford Site is not doing enough about a leak from a single-shell, high-level waste tank made public in April 2021, according to a Washington state lawmaker and some other members of the Hanford Advisory Board. Hanford bosses and the Washington state Department of Ecology lack a sense of urgency […]

Since the confirmed, domestic start of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management has confirmed 7,916 cases of the illness among the agency’s workforce, a spokesperson said Thursday. Likewise, the latest weekly total of confirmed cases is 313, a whopping jump of 242 since the office’s last weekly […]

With litigation on a controversial contract award two years ago still ongoing, the Department of Energy has extended incumbent Swift & Staley as the landlord services provider at the Paducah Site in Kentucky through February, a spokesperson confirmed via email this week. Without the extension, first revealed in a U.S. Court of Federal Claims order, […]

As of mid-December, the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., had received 210 shipments of defense-related transuranic waste in 2021, beating the 2020 total of 192 shipments before the calendar year was out, according to the deep-underground repository’s website. In November alone, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) received 27 shipments […]

The Department of Energy has picked up the first two-year option in its agreement with HPM Corp., the incumbent provider of occupational medical services to thousands of federal and contractors at the Hanford Site in Washington state. The three-year base period of the potential seven-year, $152-million contract with Kennewick. Wash.,-based HPM Corp. (HPMC), was due […]

The new management team is in place at the Idaho National Laboratory, according to the Idaho Environmental Coalition’s website. The change was effective Jan. 1. The Idaho Environmental Coalition (IEC) has a potential ten-year, $6.4 billion contract and took  over from Fluor Idaho.  Ty Blackford is the president and program manager at the new team, […]

Nuclear Waste Partnership, the Amentum-BWX Technologies team that runs the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, won 62% of its subjective fee for fiscal year 2021 and 72% of its overall fee, according to a Dec. 30  scorecard from the Department of Energy. The contractor took home about $3.3 million out of a potential […]

Over time, prominent historical figures such as Danish physicist Niels Bohr and New York Yankee catcher Yogi Berra are said to have warned us that predictions are tough to make, especially about the future. So despite the obvious challenges of prognostication, Weapons Complex Monitor will open the year with a few observations about some big […]

The Department of Energy and the New Mexico Environment Department were to hold an online public meeting Thursday evening to discuss cleanup at the Los Alamos National Laboratory under a 2016 consent agreement between the state and the feds that the state’s governor has lately criticized.  The meeting, run by the DOE Office of Environmental […]

The Department of Energy’s Environmental Management published draft solicitations Tuesday for two contracts potentially worth more than $7.7 billion combined at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio and the Paducah Site in Kentucky. The larger draft request for proposals (RFP) is for the potential $5.87-billion Portsmouth Decontamination and Decommissioning Contract, DOE said in a press release. […]

Nuclear Waste Partnership, the Amentum-BWX Technologies team that runs the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, won 62% of its subjective fee for fiscal year 2021 and 72% of its overall fee, according to a recently-released scorecard from the Department of Energy. The contractor took home about $3.3 million out of a potential $5.3 […]

The new management team is in place at the Idaho National Laboratory, according to the Idaho Environmental Coalition’s website. The change was effective Jan. 1. The Idaho Environmental Coalition (IEC) has a potential ten-year, $6.4 billion contract and took  over from Fluor Idaho.  Ty Blackford is the president and program manager at the new team, […]

The Department of Energy’s Carlsbad Field Office in New Mexico has retained California-based Tetra Tech to work on a supplemental environmental impact statement and related documents for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. The agreement for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) documents is potentially worth $1.8-million, according to a Dec. 27 task order award notice […]

A Department of Energy Office of Legacy Management program has identified 360 abandoned uranium mines on tribal lands across the western U.S. and is working with other government agencies to assess the safety and environmental risk posed by the sites, Legacy Management said in a press release this month. About 96% of the sites identified […]

The Department of Energy could solicit bids for long-term management and storage of elemental mercury in January, the Office of Environmental Management said in a procurement update after Christmas. After court action by gold mining companies forced DOE to drop earlier plans to designate Waste Control Specialists in West Texas as its preferred long-term storage […]

The head of the New Mexico Environment Department, James Kenney, supports a congressional committee’s call for the Government Accountability Office to examine practices at the Department of Energy’s nuclear cleanup office. Kenney wrote this week to the U.S. Comptroller General Gene Dodaro, who heads the Government Accountability Office (GAO), backing a request this month by […]

The top fed at the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management expects the Tank-Side Cesium Removal project at the Hanford Site in Washington state to begin operating “within weeks.” Office of Environmental Management (EM) senior adviser William (Ike) White made the comment Monday during an online meeting of the chairs of the chairs of […]

The Department of Energy’s cleanup branch announced this week that Joel Bradburne is the new field office manager at the Portsmouth-Paducah Project Office, after acting as the top boss for operations in Ohio and Kentucky since Robert Edwards retired at the end of July. “In this role he will oversee the deactivation and demolition of […]

Following a nationwide injunction blocking contractors for the Department of Energy and other agencies from ordering workers to be vaccinated against COVID-19 to keep their jobs, several other vaccine lawsuits against specific DOE sites are shifting to federal appeals courts, legal filings this week show. In the matter of the nationwide injunction, the Justice Department […]

More than 90% of the federal employees and contract workers at the Department of Energy’s nuclear cleanup branch have now been vaccinated against COVID-19, with more than 2,000 apparently still not taking the shot. “The vast majority of our [Environmental Management] EM workforce is vaccinated,” a spokesperson for the DOE Office of Environmental Management said […]

The top federal manager at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site said this week that cleanup of the Plutonium Finishing Plant is basically finished, while a nuclear boss with the Washington Department of Ecology indicated there is a general agreement about future remediation needs at the former plutonium production hub. Those were a couple of […]

With about a month to go before the Department of Energy planned return-to-work, about 60% of a 10,000-strong workforce at the Hanford Site in Washington state was on premises each day, site manager Brian Vance told the Hanford Advisory Board this week. While the DOE on Dec. 3 rolled out a plan to get most […]

More than 90% of the workers for CH2M HILL BWXT West Valley were vaccinated prior to a Dec. 8 deadline set by the contractor at the West Valley Demonstration Project site in New York state, deputy general manager Kelly Wooley told an online Citizen Task Force meeting Wednesday night.  As a result, federal court orders […]

Weapons Complex Monitor will not publish on Dec. 24 in observance of the Christmas holiday or on Dec. 31 in observance of the New Year’s holiday. Look for the next issue in your inbox on Monday, Jan. 3. Happy holidays!

A Department of Energy policy from 2019 that found certain less-risky high-level radioactive waste can be treated and disposed of as low-level waste was, on further review, upheld by Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, the agency said Thursday. To that end, DOE on Wednesday issued a Federal Register notice affirming that this altered interpretation of […]

With about a month to go before the Department of Energy planned return-to-work, about 60% of a 10,000-strong workforce at the Hanford Site in Washington state was on premises each day, site manager Brian Vance told the Hanford Advisory Board Wednesday. While the DOE on Dec. 3 rolled out a plan to get most federal […]

The Department of Energy’s nuclear cleanup office could find out soon if the administration of President Joe Biden will back a second trial run moving certain high-level radioactive waste out of the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and disposing of it in a facility licensed for low-level waste. That was the word Monday from […]

More than 90% of the federal employees and contract workers at the Department of Energy’s nuclear cleanup branch have now been vaccinated against COVID-19, with more than 2,000 apparently still not taking the shot. “The vast majority of our [Environmental Management] EM workforce is vaccinated,” a spokesperson for the DOE Office of Environmental Management said […]