Office of Environmental Management (EM)

Bechtel National earned just over $7 million in fees for its work building the Waste Treatment Plant at the Energy Department’s Hanford Site near Richland Wash.: good for 71 percent of the total available for the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, 2016. DOE grades Bechtel in two major categories: the less-quantifiable project management category, which […]

A least one liquid waste-related operation is ongoing at the Savannah River Site, despite the temporary halting of liquid waste processing earlier this year. At a Savannah River Site (SRS) Citizens Advisory Board meeting last week, a DOE official said the site is about halfway through its checklist on the Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF): a plant expected […]

Bechtel National earned just over $7 million in fees for its work building the Waste Treatment Plant at the Energy Department’s Hanford Site near Richland Wash.: good for 71 percent of the total available for the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, 2016. DOE grades Bechtel in two major categories: the less-quantifiable project management category, which […]

Radioactive contamination at the Hanford Site’s double-shell Tank AZ-101 does not appear to be from a leak within the tank, the Department of Energy said Wednesday. A leak was considered possible when a robotic crawler pulled out of the annulus, or space between the tank’s two shells, on May 18 was found to be contaminated […]

A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers on Wednesday asked the Government Accountability Office to review monitoring and maintenance of aging facilities at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state after the May 9 discovery of a breached waste tunnel. “Fortunately, the collapse did not result in any injuries and no measureable release of […]

Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) this week told the head of the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management that President Donald Trump did not propose a large enough 2018 budget for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP). WIPP, the nation’s only deep-underground disposal facility for the radioactively contaminated material and equipment known as transuranic waste, would […]

The Department of Energy has rated the fiscal 2016 performance of Hanford Site support services provider Mission Support Alliance (MSA) as “very good.” The contractor earned 91 percent of the available fee, or a little more than $19.2 million. The fee included 94 percent of the maximum available for meeting milestones, or nearly $13 million, […]

The $88 million top-line increase the Donald Trump administration proposed Tuesday for the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management in fiscal 2018 is two-and-a-half times less than the office would spend next year to start decontaminating disused nuclear-weapon facilities now owned by DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The administration’s new budget plan, if […]

Radioactive contamination at the Hanford Site’s double-shell Tank AZ-101 does not appear to be from a leak within the tank, the Department of Energy said Wednesday. A leak was considered possible when a robotic crawler pulled out of the annulus, or space between the shells of the tank, on May 18 was found to be […]

WASHINGTON — There is no firm timetable for release of the Department of Energy Office of Environmental Management’s detailed budget request for fiscal 2018, the office’s acting head told Weapons Complex Morning Briefing Tuesday. The Office of Environmental Management (EM), for which the Donald Trump administration has proposed a roughly $6.5-billion budget for the fiscal […]

The $88 million top-line increase the Donald Trump administration proposed Tuesday for the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management in fiscal 2018 is two-and-a-half times less than the office would spend next year to start decontaminating disused nuclear-weapon facilities now owned by DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The administration’s new budget plan, if approved by Congress, […]

Members of Washington state’s congressional delegation used two recent emergencies at the Hanford Site to make the case for strong funding for the Department of Energy facility in a letter to Energy Secretary Rick Perry. “It is clear aging infrastructure and the waste contained within it continues to present a threat to the health and […]

Savannah River Remediation expects to save about $10 million by repairing, rather than replacing, a piece of equipment essential for chemical separations operations at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina, a company executive told a citizens group Monday. The equipment, a nearly 30-foot-high evaporator pot that last year leaked some 3,000 gallons […]

A heavy plastic cover was installed Saturday over the partially collapsed PUREX plant waste tunnel at the Energy Department’s Hanford Site in Washington state. Work is expected to continue through Monday to secure the cover’s sides with 150 concrete ecology blocks and to crisscross cable lacings from the blocks across the top of the soil […]

Radioactive contamination discovered Thursday night could be a sign that a second double-shell tank at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state is leaking waste into the space between its shells. A robotic crawler had been inserted down a riser into the space between the shells, or the annulus, of Tank AZ-101 as […]

Workers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory on Wednesday morning sent the first barrel of potentially explosive nitrate-salt waste to the building where it will be cleaned up and prepared for eventual disposal at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, a source in New Mexico said. Stephen Hoffman, deputy manager of the agency’s Environmental Management Los […]

The Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management would get about $6.5 billion for fiscal 2018, including a small increase for the agency’s major closure sites and a small overall decrease for uranium-enrichment cleanups, according to a leaked document a Washington, D.C.-based think tank said contains the White House’s upcoming budget request. The spreadsheet was released […]

The Energy Department shipped about two shipments a week of transuranic waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in April, meeting the throughput target the agency set for itself in the mine’s first month of relatively normal operations in three years. The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), near Carlsbad, N.M., reopened in January after a […]

The White House sent Texas insurance lobbyist Dan Brouillette’s nomination to be deputy secretary of energy to the Senate on Thursday, marking the Donald Trump administration’s first substantial change to DOE’s leadership since Rick Perry was sworn in as secretary of energy in March. Brouillette, said to have been handpicked for the job by Perry, […]

A freight train operated by BNSF Railway and carrying debris from the demolition of the Energy Department’s Separations Research Process Unit in upstate New York derailed on May 13 near Bosworth, Mo., though no one was hurt and no waste was spilled. A spokesperson for AECOM, prime contractor on the demolition of the 1950s-era plutonium research facility […]

Hanford Site officials were hoping for little or no wind Friday to they can lay a plastic covering over the entire length of the PUREX plant underground waste tunnel where a breach was discovered on May 9. Weather permitting, workers will stage a heavy piece of industrial plastic beside the soil berm that tops the […]

It will take until 2031 to empty and seal 16 underground waste tanks at the Energy Department’s Hanford Site near Richland, Wash. — 12 years later than the end-date DOE and Washington state set in 2010, the federal agency said late Monday in a regulatory filing. The 16 single-shell tanks to be emptied and closed are in Hanford’s […]

The Energy Department shipped about two shipments a week of transuranic waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in April, meeting the throughput target the agency set for itself in the mine’s first month of relatively normal operations in three years. The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), near Carlsbad, N.M., reopened in January after a […]

Workers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory on Wednesday morning sent the first barrel of potentially explosive nitrate-salt waste to the building where it will be cleaned up and prepared for eventual disposal at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, a source in New Mexico said. Stephen Hoffman, deputy manager of the agency’s Environmental Management Los […]

Five citizens groups on Wednesday sued the U.S. Interior Department over plans to build park infrastructure and services at the Energy Department’s former plutonium pit production site at the Rocky Flats Nuclear Plant in Colorado. The groups suing are: the Rocky Mountain Peace & Justice Center; Candelas Glows/Rocky Flats Glows; Rocky Flats Right To Know; […]

The Energy Department said its effort to clean up potentially explosive transuranic waste at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico was slowed again last week after the site’s contractor discovered a possible crack in a machine vital to the project. On May 8, workers at the lab’s Waste Characterization, Reduction, and Repackaging Facility […]

The Energy Department on Monday submitted its plans for closing four single-shell liquid-waste tanks at the Hanford Site near Richland, Wash., the Washington state Department of Ecology confirmed. DOE was once supposed to deliver the closure schedule by March 30, but the state Department of Ecology and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency — the two main regulators […]

Most of the Hanford Site workers facing layoff this month have been placed in other positions. CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co. (CHPRC), one of the cleanup primes for the Department of Energy site in Washington state, announced in March it planned to cut up to 250 jobs in three rounds of layoffs in early May, […]

Earnings at engineering services firm Jacobs, a support contractor at a number of Energy Department sites, fell more than 20 percent year over year to about $50 million for the fiscal second quarter ended March 31, the company said Tuesday. Quarterly revenue rose 20 percent to about $2.8 billion, according to the company’s latest earnings […]

The emergency declared Tuesday at the Hanford Site in Washington state when a breach was discovered in one of the underground waste storage tunnels for the Plutonium Uranium Extraction (PUREX) Plant was formally ended after workers finished filling in the hole late Wednesday night. “(The work) was accomplished swiftly and safely to prevent any further […]