Cleanup & Remediation

We welcome and publish comments from our readers. Write us a short letter to the editor (300 words) or a fuller commentary (800 words) about your work at DOE weapon sites and send it to us by Wednesday for publication in the following Friday’s Weapons Complex Monitor newsletter. Write about any DOE nuclear-cleanup topic you […]

Chris Kemp left his job as deputy federal project director for retrieval and closure at the Energy Department’s Office of River Protection at the Hanford Site for another DOE job, an agency spokesperson said last week. Kemp, who remains at the Washington state site, is now director of the environmental compliance division at the Office […]

An Environmental Protection Agency transition team official for President Donald Trump expressed interest in picking up the pace of cleanup at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site. Trump tapped Washington state Sen. Doug Ericksen (R) to serve as one of 10 transition team members for the EPA in Washington, D.C.; the lawmaker also is the […]

Demolition of the Hanford Site’s Plutonium Finishing Plant is expected to resume next week following a radioactive contamination spread found last week at the Energy Department facility once used to shape plutonium for insertion into nuclear weapons. At about 4:45 p.m. Jan. 27 a radiation monitor issued an alarm near the demolition area of the […]

A Richland, Wash., resident has voluntarily withdrawn a lawsuit demanding that now-former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy issue or deny the Hanford Site air operating permit required under the federal Clean Air Act. Attorneys for Bill Green filed the notice of voluntary dismissal on Dec. 14 in U.S. District Court for Eastern Washington. Judge Salvador […]

Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth has pushed back by up to six months the date for rendering the Energy Department’s 60 year-old X-326 uranium enrichment building cold and dark, according to a senior company executive. “[O]ur goal in the X-326 is to be ‘cold & dark’ by the end of this calendar year,” Dennis Carr, Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth’s program director, […]

A Richland, Wash., resident has voluntarily withdrawn a lawsuit demanding that now-former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy issue or deny the Hanford Site air operating permit required under the federal Clean Air Act. Attorneys for Bill Green filed the notice of voluntary dismissal on Dec. 14 in U.S. District Court for Eastern Washington. Judge Salvador […]

Decommissioning expert Robert Kury is off the job at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant decontamination and decommissioning project, according to an internal memo from the Energy Department’s prime cleanup contractor at the Piketon, Ohio, site. Kury “has left the Project to attend to personal matters,” Dennis Carr, Portsmouth site director for Fluor-BWXT, wrote in a memo […]

The spread of radioactive contamination outside the Hanford Site’s Plutonium Finishing Plant has stopped demolition, but work is expected to resume later this week. At about 4:45 p.m. Friday a radiation monitor issued an alarm near the area of the plant now undergoing demolition. About 10 minutes later the spread of radiation near the demolition site […]

Chris Kemp left his job as deputy federal project director for retrieval and closure at the Energy Department’s Office of River Protection at the Hanford Site for another DOE job, an agency spokesperson said Friday. “Chris made a lateral move effective the beginning of the month,” the official said by email. Kemp, who remains at the […]

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 […]

A quote in an article in the Jan. 20 issue of Weapons Complex Monitor, that the price of emptying Tank AY-102 at the Hanford Site is “going to be over $40 million,” should have been attributed to Chris Kemp of the Department of Energy’s Office of River Protection. An article in the Jan. 20 issue described […]

The Energy Department may reclassify its West Valley Demonstration Project as a defense nuclear site, upping the federal funding for which the former spent fuel reprocessing facility is eligible, a local New York newspaper reported last week. Former Energy Sec. Ernest Moniz notified Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) of the possibility Thursday, the Olean Times Herald […]

Plaintiffs and defendants have agreed to mediation in an attempt to settle the lawsuit over worker protection from tank waste vapors at the Hanford Site in Washington state. They filed a joint motion in U.S. District Court for Eastern Washington asking the judge to extend the schedule in the case to allow time for mediation. […]

A five-year, fixed-price, indefinite-quantity/indefinite-delivery technical support contract for the Energy Department’s Moab site in Utah has gone out for bids as a small business set-aside, the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management announced Thursday. The Moab Uranium Mill Tailings Remedial Action (UMTRA) technical assistance contract covers services for the Utah cleanup site including: records management; […]

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 […]

It was not immediately clear whether a federal hiring freeze instituted by the newly installed Donald Trump administration has affected the legacy nuclear cleanup by the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management (EM), which since Trump’s inauguration had posted only a single vacancy to a federal job site. The listing on USAJobs.gov for a […]

A $74.2 million project to clean up the coal ash stored at the Savannah River Site is progressing through its second phase, with roughly two-and-a-half years left to complete the work, a site official reported this week. The D Area Ash Project involves 1.3 million cubic yards of ash stored on 90 acres of land […]

The Energy Department and contractor Fluor Idaho have decided to delay by several years the demolition of an iconic nuclear reactor dome at the Idaho National Laboratory. Officials planned to tear down the dome of the Experimental Breeder Reactor-II last fall — one of the final steps of the EBR-II facility decontamination and decommissioning process […]

  The Hanford Site’s Office of River Protection has obtained samples of glass up to 2,000 years old to help it learn more about how the substance ages as the Department of Energy facility prepares to vitrify, or glassify, tank waste. The ancient glass is being studied to predict how glassified waste might age over […]

Energy Department contractor North Wind Group, of Idaho Falls, Idaho, said Friday it has acquired fellow DOE contractor Portage, also of Idaho Falls, in an all-stock deal. Other terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Portage will operate as a North Wind subsidiary, bringing the parent company’s headcount to about 1,100 employees, according to a […]

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 […]

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 […]

At least one Energy Department rule, which would strengthen protections for whistleblowers at DOE contractors, could be delayed by the regulatory freeze President Donald Trump instituted on his first day in office. The new rule, published by the administration of now-former President Barack Obama, clarified that DOE can assess civil penalties against contractors that retaliate against […]

Weapons Complex Morning Briefing on Monday described Nuclear Fuel Services Inc., the former spent nuclear fuel reprocessor at what is now the West Valley Demonstration Project in New York state, as defunct. The business continues to operate as a BWX Technologies subsidiary that produces nuclear fuel for the U.S. Navy.

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 […]

Energy Department contractor North Wind Group, of Idaho Falls, Idaho, said Friday it has acquired fellow DOE contractor Portage, also of Idaho Falls, in an all-stock deal. Other terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Portage will operate as a North Wind subsidiary, bringing the parent company’s headcount to about 1,100 employees, according to a […]