Office of Environmental Management (EM)

There was no evidence this week of a blanket gag order on external communication from the Energy Department under newly inaugurated President Donald Trump, whose administration has tweeted steadily since Inauguration Day from the official @ENERGY Twitter account. The Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies were directed to stand down temporarily from communication with […]

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said it will not penalize private contractor Waste Control Specialists for moving potentially explosive barrels of federally owned nuclear waste without the proper authorization in 2014. In June 2014, in apparent violation of an NRC order, Waste Control Specialists moved 73 containers of transuranic nitrate-salt waste generated by weapons programs at […]

There was no evidence as of Wednesday of a blanket gag order on external communication from the Energy Department under newly inaugurated President Donald Trump, whose administration has tweeted steadily since Inauguration Day from the official @ENERGY Twitter account. The Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies have been directed to stand down temporarily from […]

The onetime switch house for uranium enrichment facilities at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge site in Tennessee has been fully demolished, cleanup contractor URS-CH2M Oak Ridge said this week. Elimination of Building K-731 is another step in restoration of the 2,200-acre former enrichment complex now known as the East Tennessee Technology Park. “The former switch […]

The first potential chemical vapors incident of the new year at the Hanford Site’s radioactive waste storage tank farms was reported Wednesday. Nine workers at the Department of Energy site in Washington state reported odors near worker trailers outside the AP Tank Farm, and were told to leave the area, according to tank farm contractor […]

A key Savannah River Site (SRS) waste treatment facility returned to operations last month after a three-month scheduled outage to address equipment concerns. The Saltstone Production Facility (SPF) receives low-radioactive salt solution that has been separated from radioactive sludge. That pre-separation material is stored together in more than 40 liquid waste tanks, which in total hold about 35 […]

Former Assistant Energy Secretary for Environmental Management Monica Regalbuto will remain at the Energy Department as a senior technical adviser for the agency’s $6-billion-a-year legacy nuclear cleanup program, the longtime DOE hand said in a farewell message to colleagues. Weapons Complex Morning Briefing obtained a copy of Regalbuto’s letter. “I am pleased and honored to continue to be part […]

Susan Cange, second-highest in the chain of command at the Energy Department’s nuclear cleanup office, became acting assistant secretary for environmental management on Friday. Cange, a career civil servant who joined the Office of Environmental Management in Washington, D.C., from the Oak Ridge site in Tennessee late last year, replaces Monica Regalbuto on a temporary […]

Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of quarterly news summaries and analyses about President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office. We’ll check in with one long, big-picture update every 25 days, with a regular flow of updates in between to keep you up to date on news affecting Department of Energy […]

The Savannah River Site liquid waste tank farms hold less than 35 million gallons of waste for the first time since 1999, according to a Jan. 9 Facebook post from Savannah River Remediation (SRR), the Department of Energy facility’s liquid waste contractor. Since taking over the contract in 2009, SRR’s goal has been to rid the […]

The Energy Department is likely next year to miss another major nuclear waste removal milestone set in its 1995 settlement agreement with the state of Idaho. Under the agreement, DOE committed to remove from the Idaho National Laboratory site some 65,000 cubic meters of stored transuranic waste by the end of 2018. But limited operations […]

Prosidian Consulting of North Carolina has been awarded a firm-fixed-price contract worth up to $2 million for management and facilitation services to the Hanford Advisory Board in Washington state. The Department of Energy contract is for a one-year-base period with four one-year options. Prosidian replaces EnviroIssues, which has offices in the Northwest, including near the […]

The Energy Department is on track to empty most of the waste in a leaky double-shell tank at the Hanford Site in Washington state by a March 4 regulatory deadline — a job likely to cost more than $40 million, a DOE official said Wednesday. The final bill for draining waste from Tank AY-102 is […]

The Trump administration will take a hard look at the Energy Department’s budget for legacy nuclear waste cleanup, Energy Secretary-designate Rick Perry said Thursday during his Senate confirmation hearing. “[P]rioritizing the funding and managing that funding in an appropriate way to clean up these waste sites is going to be very, very high on the priority […]

Centrus Energy Corp. plans to ship low-level waste from the decommissioned American Centrifuge uranium enrichment demonstration facility in Piketon, Ohio, to the Nevada National Security Site for disposal beginning in March, company filings with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission show. “Planning and budgeting for the waste shipments by Centrus, the waste disposal contractor and the transportation […]

Prosidian Consulting of North Carolina has been awarded a firm-fixed-price contract worth up to $2 million for management and facilitation services to the Hanford Advisory Board in Washington state. The Department of Energy contract is for a one-year-base period with four one-year options. Prosidian replaces EnviroIssues, which has offices in the Northwest, including near the […]

The Savannah River Site liquid waste tank farms hold less than 35 million gallons of waste for the first time since 1999, according to a Jan. 9 Facebook post from Savannah River Remediation (SRR), the Department of Energy facility’s liquid waste contractor.   Since taking over the contract in 2009, SRR’s goal has been to […]

Despite progress made to address vapors from waste storage tanks at the Hanford Site in Washington state, union worker concerns have not decreased, according to a new review from the Department of Energy Office of Enterprise Assessments. The review largely echoed findings released in late November by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National […]

Despite a few unplanned days off due to wicked winter weather in Washington state, the Energy Department still expects to tear down the Plutonium Finishing Plant at the Hanford Site to the concrete slab on which it was built by a Sept. 30 regulatory deadline, a DOE official said Monday. “Right now, we still think we […]

The environmental remediation contractor for the Department of Energy’s West Valley Demonstration Project in upstate New York earned “very good” ratings in all four categories of its latest performance evaluation. That was enough to earn CH2M Hill BWXT West Valley (CHBWV) a $360,000 award fee, 80 percent of the total available $450,694 for the performance period […]

The mayor of the village of Piketon wants the Energy Department to fund an independent assessment of the nuclear landfill the agency wants to build at the former uranium enrichment site near the small town in southeast Ohio. DOE formally decided to build the proposed 100-acre on-site disposal cell in 2015, saying it was the least […]

French multinational nuclear company AREVA on Wednesday announced the formation of a new subsidiary to manage its operations in the United States. The move is part of the troubled company’s broader restructuring, in which it is focusing on nuclear fuel cycle work and selling off its reactor business. Sam Shakir, an executive with AREVA for […]

LANS Earns 90% of FY16 Fee for Lab Cleanup Contract By Chris Schneidmiller Los Alamos National Security earned 90 percent of available fees in fiscal 2016 for its bridge contract for legacy cleanup operations at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, according to the latest performance scorecard from the Department of Energy’s Office […]

The top contractor at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site is looking for clarity on whether millions of dollars in “unallowable” expense filings in recent years were actually unallowable, as claimed by the federal government, On March 18, the Department of Justice sued Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, the management and operations contractor for the […]

Up on Capitol Hill, a few congressional committees with jurisdiction over the Energy Department’s legacy nuclear cleanup and nuclear arsenal programs officially got new leaders for the new Congress this week. Most of the changes announced so far are in the Republican-controlled House, where the GOP has instituted term limits for chairs of standing committees such […]

CARLSBAD, N.M. — Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz on Monday put the incoming Donald Trump administration on notice that the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) ― the nation’s only deep-underground nuclear waste disposal site ― is too important to fail. Less than two weeks before the president who nominated him leaves office, Moniz headlined a group […]

Bechtel National and its primary subcontractor, AECOM, have created a new company for on-site work at the Hanford Site’s Waste Treatment Plant (WTP). Bechtel National remains the prime contractor for the WTP project and has total responsibility for delivering the vitrification plant to the Department of Energy, said Peggy McCullough, the company’s project director, in […]

The Idaho National Laboratory’s cleanup contractor, Fluor Idaho, has been paid $4.1 million in performance award and incentive fees since in June taking over the contracts of CH2M-WG Idaho and Idaho Treatment Group. Fluor will receive its first formal performance report card at the end of fiscal 2017. The contractor is expected to tally another […]

The Energy Department on Jan. 6 released a draft environmental impact statement for soil and groundwater cleanup and building demolition at the former rocket and atomic test site at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory in Simi Valley, Calif. The overdue draft — DOE once thought it would finish the site’s environmental impact process last year — examines a range […]

Los Alamos National Security earned 90 percent of all fees available in fiscal 2016 for its bridge contract for legacy cleanup operations at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, according to the latest performance scorecard from the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management. The contractor’s fee totaled $9.1 million, of a total […]