Cleanup & Remediation

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 […]

A Jacobs Engineering subsidiary has secured the $350 million contract for remediation of the Parks Township, Pa., Shallow Land Disposal Area under the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program (FUSRAP), the Defense Department announced this week. The cost-plus-fixed-free contract awarded to Jacobs Field Services North America covers “development of work plans, […]

Editor’s note: This is the final installment in a series of quarterly news summaries and analyses about President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office. What has DOE’s Cold War nuclear cleanup program gotten out of President Donald Trump’s White House so far? At 100 days in, the tally stands at one new secretary of […]

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 […]

Liquid waste workers are filling another of the Savannah River Site’s disposal units with decontaminated salt solution. Savannah River Remediation (SRR), the liquid waste contractor at the Department of Energy site in South Carolina, is filling Saltstone Disposal Unit (SDU) 3A, according to a Facebook post Tuesday. Work began in February. SDUs are cylindrical concrete […]

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 Nuclear Regulatory Commission said this week it would begin its technical review of the Energy Department’s application for a 20-year extension of its license to store Three Mile Island nuclear power plant debris in Idaho. Renewal would push back the expiration date for the Three Mile Island Unit 2 (TMI-2) Independent Spent Fuel Storage […]

Three men have been charged with trespassing on 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 incident. […]

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 […]

Los Alamos National Security, the contractor managing the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, should improve its work planning and control processes, the Department of Energy’s Office of Enterprise Assessments said in a newly released enforcement letter to lab director Charles McMillan. The April 19 letter to the contractor said the Enterprise Assessments office […]

The U.S. Department of Labor will no longer assume that applicants to Part E of the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program were not exposed to unsafe levels of toxins after 1995 at the Hanford Site and other locations. A search will be conducted to find denied claims in which that assumption may have been […]

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 […]

  Plaintiffs and defendants met with a mediator for a first session Thursday to attempt to resolve a lawsuit demanding better protection for Hanford Site workers exposed to chemical vapors from waste tanks, according to Hanford tank farm contractor Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS). The session, held in Seattle, was expected to continue today. Washington […]

Monica Regalbuto, the Energy Department’s nuclear-cleanup chief during the last two years of the Barack Obama administration, will be the commencement speaker for this year’s graduation ceremony at the University of South Carolina Aiken on May 3. The ceremony will take place at the USC Aiken Convocation Center, about 30 miles by road from the […]

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 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 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 […]

Monica Regalbuto, the Energy Department’s nuclear-cleanup chief during the last two years of the Barack Obama administration, will be the commencement speaker for this year’s graduation ceremony at the University of South Carolina Aiken on May 3. The ceremony will take place at the USC Aiken Convocation Center, about 30 miles by road from the […]

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 […]

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 […]

For the first time in three years, the Energy Department has sent shipments of transuranic waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico for permanent disposal. Shipments from separate DOE facilities either arrived at WIPP or departed for it this week. One shipment arrived early Monday from the Idaho National Laboratory, while another […]

Officials from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will be in New Ellenton, S.C., on April 18 to discuss the agency’s latest performance evaluation of the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility being built at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site. The regulator gave a positive review of 2016 operations at the plant intended to process 34 […]