Office of Environmental Management (EM)

The Energy Department has until Friday to tell the Washington state Department of Ecology when the agency plans to close four single-shell tanks at the Hanford Site near Richland, Wash. The schedule due to the state at the close of the week includes closure dates for tanks C-201, C-202, C-203, and C-204: four of the […]

HPM Corp., the occupational medical services provider at the Hanford Site in Washington state, earned 91.7 percent of its possible award fee for fiscal 2016, the Department of Energy told the company last week. HPMC earned $302,610 of the available $330,000, according to DOE. The evaluation represented a small improvement over the previous fiscal year […]

Workers at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site last month identified “three distinctive streams of liquid leaking” from the 3H Evaporator, a large pot that reduces the volume of the salt waste so that space within the facility’s storage tanks is available for continuing liquid waste operations. The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) […]

Nuclear fuel supplier Centrus Energy will report its 2016 earnings Tuesday afternoon and host its next quarterly earnings call with investors Wednesday. Centrus, the former U.S. Enrichment Corp., is decommissioning and decontaminating the industrial-scale uranium enrichment demonstration known as the American Centrifuge project in Piketon, Ohio. Centrus scheduled the call not long after Sens. Sherrod […]

Ohio’s U.S. Senate delegation this week formally invited newly minted Energy Secretary Rick Perry to tour the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon, Ohio, where the Energy Department is weighing big changes for a uranium cleanup that could take much longer than expected. “We would like to formally invite you to Piketon, Ohio, to see […]

Months before a state regulatory deadline, the Energy Department and its prime contractor at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant have stopped using emergency above-ground waste storage space at the mine, according to a Monday regulatory filing. “On February 9, 2017, [DOE and Nuclear Waste Partnership] reconfigured the TRU [transuranic] mixed waste in storage in the […]

Cleanup of the former uranium enrichment facilities at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon, Ohio, would slide into the 2030s under a new demolition plan DOE and site remediation contractor Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth are discussing internally. According to the plan obtained by Weapons Complex Monitor, the agency and Fluor-BWXT would delay demolition of Portsmouth’s three […]

  The Energy Department is refusing to say when two outstanding cleanup contracts might be awarded at the Idaho National Laboratory site, or why the contract procurements were delayed in the first place. DOE early last year awarded its primary five-year Idaho cleanup contract — worth about $1.4 billion — to the contractor team Fluor […]

A federal judge on Monday ordered that 1 metric ton of plutonium be removed from South Carolina, but did not set a schedule for that to happen. The state sued the Department of Energy and its semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration last year, claiming they had breached a 2003 agreement to by Jan. 1, 2016, […]

The Hanford Site’s waste tank farms were placed under a stop work order from late Monday afternoon until mid-Tuesday afternoon after a worker raised concerns about beryllium safety. The work stoppage, which was called by a single union employee, covered activities requiring beryllium controls or intrusive operations in the tank farms. Any employee can halt […]

Months before a state regulatory deadline, the Energy Department and its prime contractor at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant have stopped using emergency above-ground waste storage space at the mine, according to a Monday regulatory filing. “On February 9, 2017, [DOE and Nuclear Waste Partnership] reconfigured the TRU [transuranic] mixed waste in storage in the Waste […]

Cleanup of the former uranium enrichment facilities at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon, Ohio, would slide into the 2030s under a new demolition plan DOE and site remediation contractor Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth are discussing internally. According to the plan obtained by Weapons Complex Morning Briefing, the agency and Fluor-BWXT would delay demolition of Portsmouth’s […]

Ohio’s U.S. Senate delegation this week formally invited newly minted Energy Secretary Rick Perry to tour the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon, Ohio, where the Energy Department is weighing big changes for a uranium cleanup that could take much longer than expected. “We would like to formally invite you to Piketon, Ohio, to see […]

The Hanford Site’s waste tank farms were placed under a stop work order from late Monday afternoon until mid-Tuesday afternoon after a worker raised concerns about beryllium safety. The work stoppage, which was called by a single union employee, covered activities requiring beryllium controls or intrusive operations in the tank farms. Any employee can halt work […]

The Energy Department’s Cold War nuclear-cleanup budget would rise more than 5 percent in fiscal 2018 to the highest inflation-adjusted level in nearly 10 years, if a federal budget proposed Thursday by the Trump administration becomes law. The White House proposed a roughly $6.5 billion budget for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) for the budget […]

Eight members of Ohio’s delegation to the House of Representatives on Monday urged new Energy Secretary Rick Perry  to visit the department’s uranium enrichment decommissioning project at Portsmouth. This is the latest of several invitations Perry has received from lawmakers to take an up close and personal view of DOE’s cleanup of its Cold War nuclear complex. […]

The Tri-City Development Council (TRIDEC) in Washington state has selected an aide to Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) to serve as its vice president of federal programs. The vice president acts as a conduit between Hanford Site-area communities and the U.S. Congress and other officials in Washington, D.C., securing funding for the Department of Energy facility […]

Washington state’s two U.S. senators are urging new Energy Secretary Rick Perry to continue the efforts started by his predecessor to better protect Hanford Site workers from chemical vapors. “Nothing less than a complete commitment to safety at Hanford is acceptable,” Democrat Sens. Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray said Thursday in a letter to Perry. […]

The Environmental Protection Agency could clear the Energy Department to keep disposing of transuranic waste at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant by mid-July, according to a recent regulatory filing. Every five years, under the federal law that created the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), EPA must recertify that DOE is complying with the environmental laws governing […]

By next week, the Energy Department and Washington River Protection Solutions must let the state of Washington know if they can safely inspect the inside of the leaky double-shell tank they just emptied at the Hanford Site. On Feb. 15, DOE tank farms contractor Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS) told the Washington Department of Ecology […]

The Energy Department and contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership have now buried most of the radioactive waste that was stranded above ground at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant three years ago, clearing out much-needed storage space for waste shipments slated to arrive from other DOE sites next month. Since the department and its WIPP prime resumed waste […]

The Environmental Protection Agency could clear the Energy Department to keep disposing of transuranic waste at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant by mid-July, according to a recent regulatory filing. Every five years, under the federal law that created the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), EPA must recertify that DOE is complying with the environmental laws governing […]

As of today, the Energy Department and Washington River Protection Solutions have one more week to let the state of Washington know if they can safely inspect the inside of the leaky double-shell tank they just emptied at the Hanford Site. On Feb. 15, DOE tank farms contractor Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS) told the […]

Eight members of Ohio’s delegation to the House of Representatives on Monday urged new Energy Secretary Rick Perry  to visit the department’s uranium enrichment decommissioning project at Portsmouth. This is the latest of several invitations Perry has received from lawmakers to take an up close and personal view of DOE’s cleanup of its Cold War nuclear complex. […]

Demolition has resumed on the Hanford Site’s Plutonium Finishing Plant, more than a month after a radiation spread was discovered on Jan. 27. In another key step forward toward demolishing the Department of Energy plant, external power was shut off on March 5. “It’s the first time in 60 years that the PFP Facility has […]

The Energy Department could soon revise an Obama administration decision that bartering government-owned uranium to pay for nuclear cleanup at the Portsmouth Site in Piketon, Ohio, does not harm the domestic uranium market, a March 9 regulatory filing shows. “The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is beginning the process to consider a new Secretarial Determination covering potential […]

The Savannah River Site received additional time Monday for storage of transuranic (TRU) waste containers outside of regulated areas so the facility can better prepare to resume shipments of the material to the newly reopened Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M. The Department of Energy site requested, from the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control […]

PHOENIX — The first three sites to ship transuranic waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico will be privately operated Waste Control Specialists of Andrews, Texas, and the Department of Energy’s Idaho and Savannah River sites, a senior DOE official said here Monday. The department has not yet decided which of those […]

Idaho officials are open to the idea of lengthening the lifespan of the Energy Department’s Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project past 2018, but DOE has yet to release a report detailing what such an extension might look like. The facility, which employs about 700 workers, was built more than 15 years ago to treat and […]

The U.S. senators from Washington state are calling on the Department of Energy’s inspector general to assess the safety environment at the Hanford, including investigating its third-party administrator for workers’ compensation claims. The request comes after DOE notified the administrator, Penser North America, that it would end its contract without exercising all options for extensions. […]