Cleanup & Remediation

Centrus Energy Corp. will shave a full year off its schedule for tearing down the canceled American Centrifuge advanced uranium enrichment technology demonstration in Ohio by starting the work sooner, a company spokesperson said Friday. “Our revised plan increases the packaging and shipping work being performed in the near term,” the Centrus spokesperson wrote in […]

A story in the March 24 issue of Weapons Complex Monitor (“DOE Office Says SRNS Retaliated Against Whistleblower,” Vol. 28, No. 12) should have said a new DOE rule intended to tighten protections for whisteblowers at contractors went into effect March 21.

The Department of Energy has applied for a 20-year renewal of the license for storage in Idaho of debris from the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, according to documents made public Tuesday. The regulator issued the license for Three Mile Island Unit 2 (TMI-2) Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installation (ISFSI) on March 19, 1999. […]

The Department of Energy has applied for a 20-year renewal of the license for storage in Idaho of debris from the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, according to documents made public Tuesday. The regulator issued the license for Three Mile Island Unit 2 (TMI-2) Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installation (ISFSI) on March 19, 1999. […]

Nearly a year after he made it, the Energy Department shot down a request from the mayor of Piketon, Ohio, to fund a third-party review of thousands of pages of documents that informed the agency’s decision to dispose of waste from uranium-enrichment cleanup at the Portsmouth Site at the facility. Piketon Mayor Billy Spencer lodged […]

  Legislation that would have made Hanford Site workers more likely to be awarded workers’ compensation has failed to pass out of a Washington state Senate committee. The deadline passed Wednesday for Senate committees to send House policy bills to the full Senate, under the Washington state Legislature’s 2017 session “cutoff calendar.” The state Senate […]

  Repairs of a key waste processing facility at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site remain on schedule for completion in 2017, but the work is taking a toll on short-term efforts to rid the facility of radioactive waste, officials reaffirmed Monday. In the interim, there is no liquid waste processing going on at […]

The White House’s proposed budget cuts for the Environmental Protection Agency would dramatically delay the end of nuclear cleanup at the Hanford Site, the head of Washington state’s nuclear cleanup oversight program told lawmakers Wednesday in a Capitol Hill hearing. Hanford has “historically stood out for the slow pace of cleanup,” and the pace would […]

Westinghouse Electric Co., the U.S. nuclear arm of financially imploding Japanese conglomerate Toshiba, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Wednesday, raising questions about the storied company’s staying-power in the nuclear decommissioning business even as it pledged continuity of operations during the reorganization. “We are focused on developing a plan of reorganization to emerge from Chapter 11 […]

HPM Corp., the Hanford occupational medical services provider at Hanford, earned 91.7 percent of the fee available in fiscal 2016, according to a notification it received from the Department of Energy last week. It earned $302,610 of the $330,000 available, according to a summary prepared by DOE. The evaluation showed a small improvement over the […]

With more of President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office gone than remaining, the Energy Department’s Cold War cleanup contractors find themselves — comfortably for now — in the eye of a political storm, shepherded through a prolonged lack of permanent agency leadership by veteran DOE managers. It has been almost a month since […]

Redacted documents released to a nuclear watchdog group show that the Savannah River Site in South Carolina will receive shipments of plutonium, uranium, and other nuclear materials for the next 15-plus years, with no current disposition pathway for much of the material already stored on-site. Savannah River Site Watch in January received via a Freedom […]

  The Hanford Site’s infamous McCluskey Room, the site of the 1976 explosion that injured worker Harold McCluskey, has been demolished. CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co. workers finished the project Wednesday, making it the first section of the Plutonium Finishing Plant (PFP) to be taken down to slab on grade. “Completing demolition on this building […]

Nearly a year after he made it, the Energy Department shot down a request from the mayor of Piketon, Ohio, to fund a third-party review of thousands of pages of documents that informed the agency’s decision to dispose of waste from uranium-enrichment cleanup at the Portsmouth Site at the facility. Piketon Mayor Billy Spencer lodged […]

The White House’s proposed budget cuts for the Environmental Protection Agency would dramatically delay the end of nuclear cleanup at the Hanford Site, the head of Washington state’s nuclear cleanup oversight program told lawmakers Wednesday in a Capitol Hill hearing. Hanford has “historically stood out for the slow pace of cleanup,” and the pace would […]

Legislation that would have made Hanford Site workers more likely to be awarded workers’ compensation has failed to pass out of a Washington state Senate committee. The deadline passed Wednesday for Senate committees to send House policy bills to the full Senate, under the Washington state Legislature’s 2017 session “cutoff calendar.” The state Senate Committee […]

Repairs of a key waste processing facility at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site remain on schedule for completion in 2017, but the work is taking a toll on short-term efforts to rid the facility of radioactive waste, officials reaffirmed Monday. All liquid waste processing is on hold at SRS following the failure of Melter […]

The Department of Energy has applied for a 20-year renewal of the license for storage in Idaho of debris from the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, according to documents made public Tuesday. The regulator issued the license for Three Mile Island Unit 2 (TMI-2) Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installation (ISFSI) on March 19, 1999. […]

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is still reviewing Centrus Energy Corp.’s plans to ship radioactive waste from the canceled American Centrifuge plant in Piketon, Ohio, to the Energy Department’s Nevada National Security Site, throwing a wrench into the company’s plan to start moving waste by the end of March. Centrus filed its waste transportation plan with […]

The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will host a hearing today on Cold War nuclear cleanup without any witnesses from the Energy Department office that manages national remediation of that waste. No one from DOE’s Office of Environmental Management is scheduled to testify at the hearing, according to the witness list on the committee’s website. Representatives […]

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) […]

An engineering professor at Texas A&M University has developed a quick test for determining the permeability of material used in storage of nuclear waste by the Department of Energy. The process, which takes minutes, can determine the potential for nuclear waste to reach the environment from storage, according to a March 22 A&M press release. […]

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 […]

Nuclear cleanup and waste treatment provider Perma-Fix Environmental Services on Wednesday reported a net loss of $13.99 million for 2016, but said the fourth quarter signaled a rebound in the business. The loss was a steep dive from a $1.9 million net loss in 2015. Net loss attributed to common stockholders also plunged from $1.1 […]

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 […]

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 […]

  Work is proceeding quickly to extract the last, but toughest, of the vertically buried pipes filled with waste at the 618-10 Burial Ground at the Hanford Site in Washington state. “We’re currently making good progress. We are approaching 50 percent completion with no unplanned events,” said Mike Jennings, director of the 618-10 Burial Ground […]

  Two former Hanford Site employees who said they have been diagnosed with toxic encephalopathy and other illnesses asked Washington state senators on Wednesday to revise the state’s workers’ compensation law to help sick workers from the Department of Energy facility. The state House of Representatives has already approved legislation that would lift the requirement […]