Budget & Policy

WASHINGTON — The annual tradition of legislative outrage over proposed reductions to nuclear cleanup spending continued in a blunt and unvarnished way here Tuesday, when Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) told Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette that the agency’s 2021 budget proposal “frankly sucks.” Heinrich was one of several vocally dissatisified legislators as Brouillette appeared before […]

WASHINGTON — The Department of Energy is revising a controversial order that curtailed the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board’s access to defense nuclear sites and personnel, and the agency plans to brief the board  this month, the Secretary of Energy told lawmakers here Tuesday. “It’s being revised,”Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette said of Order 140.1 […]

WASHINGTON — The W93 warhead will notionally be based on previously deployed nuclear-explosive components, the head of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) said here Tuesday.  The W93, a planned submarine-launched warhead and the first U.S. nuclear weapon since the Cold War that isn’t a copy or iteration of an existing weapon, has been a […]

The Department of Energy wants just a little bit less money in fiscal 2021 than it has now for research and development related to used nuclear fuel. The agency’s Office of Nuclear Energy asked for $60 million for the line item within its total budget request of nearly $1.2 billion. If approved by Congress, that […]

WASHINGTON — The top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee predicted Monday that nuclear-arsenal modernization will be “the most contentious issue” in the 2021 defense-spending debates beginning now on Capitol Hill. “[T]his is an enormous challenge,” Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) said in response to moderator questions during a morning talk at the Brookings Institute. […]

President Donald Trump intends to nominate a Democratic Party staffer on the Senate Appropriations Committee to fill a vacancy on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the White House announced Friday. There was no word from the White House regarding the schedule for the formal nomination of Christopher Hanson. Hanson said by email Friday he had no […]

Voters in California’s 25th Congressional District will begin to determine Tuesday who might succeed former U.S. Rep. Katie Hill (D) and represent an area adjacent to a major nuclear cleanup site. The district, which includes parts of Los Angeles and Ventura counties, has been without a congressional representative since Hill resigned Nov. 1 rather than […]

Two of the Senate’s reliable nuclear skeptics last week asked the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to investigate the budget increase the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is seeking for the 2021 fiscal year. Among other things, the pair want the GAO to determine why the semiautonomous Department of Energy agency’s Weapons Activities budget needs a […]

An Energy Department working group is still grappling with recommended changes on management of the payments in lieu of taxes (PILT) program for communities around nuclear facilities, Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette said Thursday. During a hearing of the House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee, the secretary promised to personally brief Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) on […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration would not be able to spend the $20 billion it requested for fiscal 2021, and so will have to make do with a more “realistic” budget, the House of Representatives’ lead appropriator for the Department of Energy said Thursday. “On the nuclear weapons side, you don’t choke a government agency by […]

As the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) seeks a larger-than-expected budget increase for 2021, another branch of the Department of Energy is seeking much less funding for cleanup of excess nuclear-weapon production sites The Office of Environmental Management (EM) is requesting about $200 million for remediation at NNSA-owned facilities in the budget year beginning Oct. 1, […]

While remediation is nearly complete at a couple of the 16 sites overseen by the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management, other cleanup efforts could last late into this century, according a roundup included in the Donald Trump administration’s budget request for fiscal 2021. The Energy Department announced in June 2019 that demolition of facilities […]

Liquid waste management at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina is in line to receive $1.05 billion in fiscal 2021, including a significant spike in spending on treatment activities that would cover the soon-to-be-operational Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF). The $1.05 billion, if approved by Congress, would be a $144.7 million […]

Nuclear remediation sites overseen by the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management would receive another small bump in funding for safeguards and security in fiscal 2021, according to budget tables released by the Donald Trump administration early Monday. The proposal for $321 million in the budget year beginning Oct. 1 is a step up from […]

The Department of Energy has requested a roughly $250 million reduction in cleanup funding for the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee as crews complete major demolition at the East Tennessee Technology Park (ETTP). The Trump administration has asked for $431 million in environmental management (EM) funding for Oak Ridge in fiscal 2021, which starts Oct. […]

President Donald Trump on Feb. 21 reaffirmed his administration’s opposition to licensing a nuclear waste disposal facility under Yucca Mountain in Nevada. “I also recently took action on an issue Nevada has been dealing with for over 30 years, Yucca Mountain, you know Yucca Mountain?” Trump said during a rally in Las Vegas. “My budget […]

Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette said Thursday he was not sure who developed the proposal to transfer management of a nuclear cleanup program back to his agency from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The proposed relocation of the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program (FUSRAP) is featured in the fiscal 2021 budget proposals for […]

The Department of Energy will seek neither to license a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, nor a federal facility for temporary centralized storage of the radioactive material, Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette said Thursday. His comments come after Brouillette’s predecessor, Rick Perry, said last fall the agency also has no legal authorization […]

The Department of Energy wants $20 million in fiscal 2021 for operations to lay the groundwork for the eventual consolidation and temporary storage of nuclear waste now dispersed around the nation. That is the largest slice of the $27.5 million requested for Interim Storage and Nuclear Waste Fund Oversight in the budget year beginning Oct. […]

The Navy’s only manufacturer of nuclear reactors, BWX Technologies, said Tuesday that the service’s plans to procure just one Virginia-class attack submarine in fiscal 2021 could hit the company’s bottom line. BWXT President and CEO Rex Geveden said in the quarterly earnings call with analysts that while there is a “long way to go on getting […]

Nuclear remediation sites overseen by the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management would receive another small bump in funding for safeguards and security in fiscal 2021, according to budget tables released by the Donald Trump administration early Monday. The proposal for $321 million in the budget year beginning Oct. 1 is a step up from […]

Funds for the Department of Energy’s planned program for interim storage of nuclear waste in the upcoming budget would be focused on headquarters operations in Washington, D.C., with smaller amounts distributed to Idaho and Nevada, according to figures released Monday. The Energy Department on Feb. 10 requested $27.5 million for an Interim Storage and Nuclear […]

The Department of Energy on Monday said it would “leverage past experience” and apply best practices to make remediation of 16 nuclear sites more cost-effective in upcoming fiscal year. The language is found in the introduction to the detailed 415-page report for the $6.1 billion budget proposed for the Office of Environmental Management in fiscal […]

President Donald Trump on Friday reaffirmed his administration’s new opposition to licensing a nuclear waste disposal facility under Yucca Mountain in Nevada. “I also recently took action on an issue Nevada has been dealing with for over 30 years, Yucca Mountain, you know Yucca Mountain?” Trump said during a rally in Las Vegas. “My budget […]

As the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) seeks a larger-than-expected budget increase for 2021, another branch of the Department of Energy is seeking much less funding for cleanup of excess nuclear-weapon production sites The Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) is requesting about $200 million for remediation at NNSA-owned facilities in the budget year […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is seeking $53 million in fiscal 2021 for the planned W93 sea-based ballistic-missile warhead: two years sooner than the agency previously thought it would need funding for the weapon. A spokesperson for the semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear weapons agency confirmed the figure Thursday morning. In the 2020 budget […]

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Tuesday it will need to collect $728.5 million in fees to fund its operations for the current federal budget year. That figure meets the agency’s mandate under the 1990 Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act to recover 90% of its yearly funding from licensee and service fees, according to a Federal Register […]

The federal Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board (NWTRB) is requesting a $2 million increase to its annual budget as it eyes added authority. The small agency’s spending cap has held steady at $3.6 million since fiscal 2016. But in the congressional budget justification for the upcoming 2021 funding year, it asked for $5.6 million. Much […]

An article in the Tuesday Weapons Complex Morning Briefing should have specified that preliminary earnings figures show Fluor’s government services business is expected to end 2019 with a backlog of $3.8 billion. Fluor’s total expected 2019 backlog is $32.7 billion.

The Energy Department declined several requests from prospective vendors to extend the Feb. 3 deadline for bidding on a potential 10-year, $3 billion Nationwide Deactivation, Decommissioning, and Removal Contract for excess facilities. The Environmental Management Consolidated Business Center last month published 152 questions and answers from potential bidders on the final request for proposals (RFP) […]