Office of Environmental Management (EM)

The Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina has implemented a new initiative aimed at streamlining spent fuel operations and cutting costs in the process. Workers with Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS), the site’s management and operations provider, are making better use of the transfer bay in L Area, according to the latest […]

The Energy Department has relaunched a database that lets the public see what kind of nuclear waste the agency is burying at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico, and when. The Waste Data System/WIPP Waste Information System went live again recently without any formal announcement by DOE. The system allows the public […]

Authorities declared an emergency for most of the day at the Hanford Site in Washington state after the roof of one waste disposal tunnel was discovered to be breached. No airborne contamination was detected and no workers were injured, but radiation monitoring was continuing Tuesday evening, according to the Department of Energy. Workers in the […]

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 press release. […]

The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico has taken delivery of some transuranic waste generated at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and formerly stored at the privately operated Waste Control Specialists disposal site near Andrews, Texas, sources in New Mexico said. WIPP took delivery of the waste last week. The sources did not quantify […]

Fluor-BWXT’s Portsmouth could wait until February 2018 to prep the X-326 uranium enrichment building for teardown, but only if it forgoes 30 percent of its award fee, according to a substantially modified contract the Energy Department released late Thursday. DOE’s Portsmouth/Paducah Project Office uploaded the modified contract, last altered May 1, to its website in […]

The Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) got an annualized budget of about $6.4 billion for fiscal 2017, some 3 percent more than last year, under the omnibus spending bill President Donald Trump signed today. The budget passed with more than half of fiscal 2017 already gone, and with only five months to write, […]

  Washington state officials were cool this week to a new government report that could point toward an alternative method for treating radioactive waste stored at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site. Grouting holds promise to effectively treat a portion of the millions of gallons of low-activity radioactive waste stored in tanks at Hanford, the […]

Workers have entered an airlock at the Hanford Site’s 324 Building for the first time in 15 years. It marks the restart of significant hands-on work to demolish the building, after careful planning and practice at a mockup facility built outside of the Department of Energy facility in Washington state. “There really is progress being […]

Bruce Covert has been appointed president of Nuclear Waste Partnership, the prime contractor for the Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, one of the contractor’s parent companies, AECOM, said Thursday. Covert will take over June 10. A nuclear-industry veteran, Covert was most recently AECOM group vice president and project director for waste […]

The House of Representatives on Wednesday passed an omnibus budget that would give the Energy Department about $30 billion for the remainder of fiscal 2017: a roughly 3-percent raise from the last budget year, but more than 2 percent less overall than the Obama administration requested for the agency more than a year ago. Within the total, […]

Mission Support Alliance, the Department of Energy’s services contractor for the Hanford Site in Washington state, recycled nearly 2,500 tons of waste last year and is working to beat that total this year. Its goal in 2016 was to keep 50 percent of Hanford nonhazardous solid waste and 50 percent of the site’s construction and […]

Montana-based S&K Logistics has secured a contract worth up to $17.4 million over five years to provide a host of technical and business assistance services for the Department of Energy Office of Environmental Management’s Los Alamos Field Office. The field office oversees cleanup of legacy nuclear contamination and waste at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in […]

The Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) would wind up with an annualized budget of $6.4 billion for fiscal 2017, about 3 percent more than last year, if an omnibus spending bill unveiled Monday becomes law. The proposed budget, which is expected to pass Congress, gives the Environmental Management office about 5 percent more, […]

Beginning in May, the Energy Department will cut the amount of excess government uranium it will barter to help pay for Cold War cleanup at the Portsmouth site in Ohio, the agency said late Friday. Even so, there will be no layoffs at the facility near Piketon for at least the rest of fiscal 2017, DOE […]

Local authorities have charged three men with illegally entering an area of the Hanford Site closed to the public to gather antlers shed by deer and elk. One of the men, Daniel Briant Charboneau, 32, of Pasco, was an employee of Hanford tank farm contractor Washington River Protection Solutions at the time of the alleged […]

Savannah River Remediation will remain the prime liquid waste managment contractor at the Savannah River Site through Dec. 31 under a six-month contract extension the Energy Department announced Thursday. DOE did not disclose the value of the modification in Thursday’s press release. The agency is in the middle of a competition for the next big liquid […]

The book would close on a whistleblower lawsuit that Bechtel National and AECOM settled last year for $125 million, under a final stipulation for dismissal the three plaintiffs filed Tuesday. The filing is mostly a formality, as the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Washington state had already dismissed much of the case […]

The book would close on a whistleblower lawsuit that Bechtel National and AECOM settled last year for $125 million, under a final stipulation for dismissal the three plaintiffs filed Tuesday. The filing is mostly a formality, as the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Washington state had already dismissed much of the case in […]

Crews should within a couple weeks begin demolition of the most contaminated portion of the Hanford Site’s most hazardous building, the Plutonium Finishing Plant. Tom Teynor, Department of Energy manager for the Plutonium Finishing Plant (PFP), provided the update on the highly contaminated canyon of the plant’s Plutonium Reclamation Facility on Tuesday at a committee […]

Nearly 5 miles of water lines at the Hanford Site have been replaced, ending both the need for frequent emergency repairs and the potential for contamination to spread deeper in the soil when aging water lines broke or leaked. The recently completed project cost about $3 million, including revegetation and related work, according to Mission […]

The Energy Department’s Office of Enterprise Assessments (EA) is investigating Bechtel National, prime contractor for the Waste Treatment Plant at the Hanford Site in Washington state, over a worker injury in November. The office did not describe the details or circumstances of the injury, except to say it occurred “during preparation of a plant cooling […]

The Energy Department’s inspector general said Tuesday a Hanford Site contractor appears on track to start removing 27 cubic meters of radioactive sludge from a building near the Columbia River by October 2018, but dinged the company for masking cost overruns with dodgy accounting. CH2M Plateau Remediation Co. “appears to be on schedule to meet […]

The Energy Department on Wednesday had planned to start treating the troublesome stream of transuranic waste at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) that leaked radiation into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant three years ago, but the day came and went without any confirmation that DOE and its contractor had begun the work. An agency spokesperson […]

The Energy Department’s inspector general said Tuesday a Hanford Site contractor appears on track to start removing 27 cubic meters of radioactive sludge from a building near the Columbia River by October 2018, but dinged the company for masking cost overruns with dodgy accounting. CH2M Plateau Remediation Co. “appears to be on schedule to meet […]

Transuranic waste from the Savannah River Site in South Carolina has landed at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., for the first time in more than three years. The material – clothing, tools, rags, residues, debris, and other material contaminated with trace amounts of plutonium – arrived last week for permanent disposal at […]

The Energy Department should cease funding cleanup of the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Ohio with bartered uranium, a Washington-based trade group for the nuclear power industry said last week. Further funding for cleanup of DOE facilities should be provided fully through congressional appropriations, so as not to disrupt uranium markets, Nuclear Energy Institute Fuel Cycle Programs Director […]

The executive board of the Hanford Atomic Metal Trades Council (HAMTC) has picked an officer from Local 427 of the International Brotherhood of Painters and Allied Trades as the next president of the umbrella group for 15 Hanford Site unions. Jeff McDaniel took over as president at the HAMTC meeting Wednesday after Dave Molnaa, who […]

  The Hanford Site is developing an acquisitions strategy as it eyes the expiration of major cleanup contracts in the next couple years, officials said Wednesday at the “Hanford Live” virtual question-and-answer session. Department of Energy officials had expected to release a comprehensive contracting strategy for Hanford in January and to issue draft requests for […]

Waste Control Specialists will retain custody of transuranic waste generated at the Los Alamos National Laboratory under a recently extended contract with Nuclear Waste Partnership: the Energy Department’s prime contractor for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. A DOE spokesperson confirmed the contract status Wednesday, but the agency declined to discuss the terms of […]