Cleanup & Remediation

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; […]

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-shelled tanks to be emptied and closed are in Hanford’s […]

All employees of central Hanford were back at work Monday after an emergency was declared May 9 following the partial collapse of an underground tunnel storing radioactively contaminated equipment near the Plutonium Uranium Extraction Plant. All but a couple hundred employees had returned to work last Thursday at the Department of Energy facility in Washington […]

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 […]

The Department of Energy plans to lay a flexible, durable plastic cover over the berm topping a long-term radioactive waste storage tunnel, where a partial roof collapse was discovered last Tuesday. The work will be done this week, weather permitting, and should take only a couple days, Doug Shoop, manager of DOE’s Richland Operations Office […]

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, […]

AECOM, a near-ubiquitous presence on the Energy Department’s legacy nuclear cleanup sites, said this week that operating income at its Management Services division sank 55 percent year over year to slightly more than $50 million in the quarter ended March 31. Management Services’ earnings from joint ventures — including some of AECOM’s partnerships for DOE nuclear […]

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 […]

Centrus Energy hedged the end date for decommissioning and decontaminating its shuttered industrial-scale uranium-enrichment demonstration in Ohio, saying in its latest quarterly earnings report Tuesday the project will be “substantially complete” by year’s end. In the 2017 first quarter, Centrus spent some $5.4 to decommission and decontaminate (D&D) the American Centrifuge plant at the Department of […]

The Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board will meet on June 21 to discuss the Energy Department’s research into the staying power of the borosilicate glass the agency wants to use to immobilize high-level liquid waste at the Hanford Site near Richland, Wash. The meeting will be held at the Courtyard Richland Columbia Point hotel in […]

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 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 edition of […]

The Washington state Department of Ecology took legal action against the Department of Energy Wednesday evening over the collapse of part of a nuclear waste tunnel discovered at the Hanford Site’s Plutonium Uranium Extraction (PUREX) Plant the day before. As a Hanford regulator, the state agency issued an enforcement order requiring assessments, reports, and submission […]

The federal trial in the case over worker protection at the Hanford Site has been postponed again to allow more time for mediation. Following requests from both the plaintiffs and defendants, Judge Thomas Rice of the U.S. District Court for Eastern Washington pushed back the trial date from March 5, 2018, to April 9, 2018. […]

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 Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board will meet on June 21 to discuss the Energy Department’s research into the staying power of the borosilicate glass the agency wants to use to immobilize high-level liquid waste at the Hanford Site near Richland, Wash. The meeting will be held at the Courtyard Richland Columbia Point hotel in […]

The Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site has newly implemented an initiative aimed at streamlining spent fuel operations and cut 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 edition of SRNS Today, a […]

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 […]

The nuclear power lobby asked the Donald Trump administration not to reinstate a utilities tax favored by the Barack Obama administration to cover a projected $20-billion shortfall for uranium-enrichment cleanup in Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. “The National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC), the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), and the Nuclear Waste Strategy Coalition (NWSC) […]

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 last week. Even so, there will be no layoffs at the facility near Piketon for at least the rest of fiscal 2017, […]

CH2M posted net earnings of about $14 million in the first quarter of 2017: a more than 40-percent drop from a year ago as revenue inched down about 3.5 percent to almost $1.2 billion. During the quarter, the company completed a corporate restructuring that began in the third quarter of 2016. In the period ended […]

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 Department of Energy has not used leading practices to manage the risk of fraud and other improper payments to its contractors and subcontractors, according to a Government Accountability Office report released Monday. The report found inconsistent review of invoices, too little data for oversight, and a lack of centralized and detailed policies. “Improper […]

  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 […]

In a paperwork milestone that speeds but does not clear the way to start treating a potentially explosive stream of transuranic waste at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico will allow the Energy Department to use a forklift as part of the agency’s planned treatment regimen. The state approved forklift use and other elements […]

The Department of Energy has not used leading practices to manage the risk of fraud and other improper payments to its contractors and subcontractors, according to a Government Accountability Office report released Monday. The report found inconsistent review of invoices, too little data for oversight, and a lack of centralized and detailed policies. “Improper payments, […]

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 […]