Innovation & Infrastructure

Bechtel executive Carl Strock is taking over as B&W Y-12’s project director for the Uranium Processing Facility with less than a month until the Government Accountability Office acts on protests that could decide the management of the Y-12 National Security Complex and its biggest construction project. Strock, a retired Army general who joined Bechtel in […]

If Physicist Ernest Moniz is confirmed as the next Secretary of the Department of Energy, he will have the opportunity to transform the agency, "if he is willing to reform, restructure, and refocus the organization to put energy innovation at the forefront of its agenda," the authors of a Clean Air Task Force and Energy […]

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Sequoia supercomputer has enabled researchers at the lab to perform record-setting simulations that utilize all 1,572,864 of the supercomputer’s computational cores, which lab officials say could have major implications for research on energy, science and the weapons program. Sequoia was recently ranked as the second fastest supercomputer in the world, operating […]

Los Alamos National Laboratory turned off its history-making Roadrunner supercomputer Sunday, ending a successful run for the pioneering IBM collaboration that marked the first computer to break the “petaflop” barrier—a quadrillion floating point calculations per second. Roadrunner accomplished the feat by adopting a revolutionary hybrid design that leveraged advanced chip designs originally developed for the […]

GE-Hitachi is proposing building a SILEX laser enrichment plant at the Department of Energy’s Paducah site in response to an expressions of interest from DOE. Responses were due Thursday for an EOI from DOE seeking future uses of the site and its materials, including its large stockpile of depleted uranium hexafluoride, as plant operator USEC […]

Los Alamos National Laboratory has restarted work on a security upgrade project that was derailed earlier this year and hopes to have the project completed by the end of September, the lab said yesterday. The second phase of the Nuclear Materials Safeguards and Security Upgrade Project, which was designed to upgrade physical security systems, protection […]

B&W Y-12, the management and operating contractor at the Y-12 National Security Complex, was marked down during its Fiscal Year 2012 Performance Evaluation Review for more than just security problems, a review of the company’s annual report card revealed. B&W Y-12 endured the worst year of its 12-year tenure at the site, receiving 58.9 percent […]

The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board wants the National Nuclear Security Administration to take a closer look at modeling assumptions underlying design of the Uranium Processing Facility. In a Sept. 6 letter to NNSA Administrator Tom D’Agostino, DNFSB Chairman Peter Winokur suggested that the NNSA hadn’t “validated’ some modeling assumptions that were used in the […]

Battelle has agreed to pay a fine of $96,800 after hundreds of bank swallow nests and thousands of eggs were destroyed during construction of a new laboratory at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. The money will go to the nonprofit National Fish and Wildlife Foundation for purchasing or restoring shrub-steppe habitat in Eastern Washington, according to […]

In another blow to the National Nuclear Security Administration’s project management record, the agency confirmed yesterday that the multi-billion-dollar Uranium Processing Facility must be redesigned to fit the necessary equipment into the 340,000-square-foot building that’s been under design for years. Project officials, including Federal Project Director John Eschenberg, had previously suggested that space issues were […]

URENCO USA yesterday announced the startup of the first of the new TC-21 centrifuge machines at the facility in Eunice, N.M. The TC-21 is expected to be more efficient and have a greater production capacity than the 21 cascades of TC-12 centrifuges already online as part of Phase One of the plant’s construction. “This also […]

A long and contentious battle over construction costs for the Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility has ended with an out-of-court settlement, but it’s still not clear how much money is changing hands because the agreement reportedly contains a confidentiality clause covering all aspects of the deal. Caddell/Blaine Joint Venture, which managed construction of the $549 […]

The Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Administration could improve energy efficiency initiatives at a number of sites, which would result in significant annual cost savings, according to a DOE Inspector General report released yesterday. Of the five sites reviewed by the IG, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Brookhaven […]

Five high performance computing companies are receiving a total of $62 million in research and development funding from the Department of Energy aimed at accelerating the nation’s push toward exascale supercomputing, which would be 1,000 times faster than today’s supercomputers. Through a combined National Nuclear Security Administration/Office of Science initiative dubbed FastForward, AMD, IBM, Intel, […]

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Sequoia supercomputer has grabbed the top spot on the list of the world’s fastest computers. The Top 500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers was revealed early this morning at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany, and the IBM-built Sequoia was able to sustain a speed of 16.32 petaflops (a […]

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and IBM are joining forces on a new high performance computing initiative aimed at helping industry in the United States increase productivity, innovation, and competitiveness. Dubbed Deep Computing Solutions, the lab and IBM will deploy officials at Livermore’s High Performance Computing Innovation Center with the goal of accelerating the development of […]

John Eschenberg, who is currently serving as the interim manager of the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Office, is taking over as the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Federal Project Director on the multi-billion-dollar Uranium Processing Facility. Eschenberg had headed up cleanup activities at the Oak Ridge Office before taking over as the acting federal head […]

Michael Lempke is set to take over as the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Associate Administrator for Infrastructure and Operations, shifting from the Office of Naval Reactors’ Naval Reactors Laboratory Field Office to assume responsibility for the agency’s site offices, NW&M Monitor has learned. Lempke will also serve as the agency’s Associate Principal Deputy Administrator, reporting […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration has selected a team led by Parsons to help beef up its project management portfolio, awarding its Enterprise Construction Management Services contract to the firm yesterday, NW&M Monitor has learned. Though the contract award has not been publicly announced, the agency notified bidders of its decision yesterday afternoon. Parsons teamed […]

Efforts to streamline support functions and reduce costs across the National Nuclear Security Administration and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science received an endorsement from the Government Accountability Office yesterday, though the watchdog agency noted in a report that future consolidation and streamlining attempts could run into challenges from the contractors that manage NNSA […]

With bids for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s combined Y-12/Pantex M&O contract due in less than a month, the agency has begun to look toward other consolidation efforts, but Principal Deputy Administrator Neile Miller told NW&M Monitor yesterday that the effort was only in its infancy. “Truly for me everything is open for discussion and […]

Sparked in part by a Department of Energy Inspector General report on management challenges at DOE, Congressional appropriators are pushing to merge the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Office of Congressional Affairs with similar functions within the Department. Registering concern with “overlap and duplication” between NNSA’s Office of Congressional Affairs, the Department of Energy’s Office of […]

A bipartisan group of 24 senators is pushing the Obama Administration to continue its support of high performance computing and a Department of Energy effort to achieve exascale computing speeds within the next decade. Exascale computing involves speeds one thousand times more powerful than supercomputers are capable of today, and the Department of Energy has […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration still has made no decisions about the two main construction options—deep or shallow excavation—for the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement-Nuclear Facility (CMRR-NF), according to a Nov. 18 letter to the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board. The shallow excavation option “will save money and result in lesser environmental impacts without undermining […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration, as expected, issued a Record of Decision yesterday to go forward with the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Nuclear Facility—CMRR-NF—at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The unsurprising move was needed as a part of the agency’s National Environmental Policy Act compliance process for the project. The ROD left open which if […]

Computer hackers continue to target the Department of Energy complex, and DOE’s Inspector General has concluded that the Department isn’t doing everything it can to protect its various networks and computer systems. In a report released yesterday, the IG noted that it found some improvements during its annual review of the computer security practices across […]