International

Here’s a look a key events we’ll be keeping an eye on this week:  Acting Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Rose Gottemoeller will be the keynote speaker at the Arms Control Association’s annual meeting today at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The event will run from 9 a.m. to […]

Russia’s presidential swap, which brought Vladimir Putin back to power last month, isn’t expected to bring about big changes to the arms control relationship between Moscow and Washington, according to the State Department’s top arms control official. Speaking at the Arms Control Association’s annual meeting yesterday, acting Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and […]

The United States is continuing to slowly reduce its strategic deployed nuclear stockpile under the New START Treaty’s counting rules, according to the twice yearly exchange of data released about U.S. and Russian weapons required under the New START Treaty. As of March 1, the U.S. has 1,737 strategic deployed nuclear warheads, the State Department […]

The United Kingdom’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority announced late last week that it is releasing a number of documents related to the upcoming competition of the Magnox and Research Sites Restoration Limited cleanup contracts. The NDA is making available its Magnox Plan Summary, a Long Range Graphic and NDA Commentary, as well as baselines related to […]

Following the Nuclear Security Summit held in late March in Seoul, South Korea, White House Senior Director for Weapons of Mass Destruction, Terrorism and Threat Reduction Laura Holgate was rankled by the calls from some nonproliferation experts for more binding, enforceable international standards on nuclear security. “They certainly never had a basis for that to […]

The Nuclear Security Summit scheduled to be held in Seoul at the end of this month is not likely to improve on progress made at the 2010 summit held in Washington, nuclear security experts from the Fissile Materials Working Group said yesterday. The Obama Administration’s goal to secure vulnerable nuclear material around the world in […]

EnergySolutions will announce today that it has been selected by Toshiba Corporation to clean up radioactively contaminated water at the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan. Toshiba was previously been selected as a preferred bidder for the work by Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the owner of the plant. EnergySolutions will aid in designing and installing […]

The second Nuclear Security Summit begins today in Seoul, South Korea, and Obama Administration officials expect the gathering of world leaders to provide an opportunity to gauge progress since the first summit two years ago in Washington and continue to gather more nuclear security commitments from countries. In recent weeks, two high profile HEU cleanouts […]

World leaders assembled for the second Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul agreed that more work was needed to prevent nuclear terrorism, according to a lofty communiqué agreed to yesterday by officials at the gathering that was noticeably lacking in details. According to the broad communiqué, countries attending the meeting restated a goal to secure vulnerable […]

Babcock Dounreay Partnership—made up of Babcock Nuclear Services Ltd, CH2M Hill and URS Holdings (UK) Ltd.—officially took over responsibility for the decommissioning of the Dounreay site in the United Kingdom yesterday. Last fall, Babcock Dounreay Partnership was selected as the preferred bidder in the competition to take ownership of Dounreay Site Restoration Limited after a […]

The New START Treaty celebrated its first birthday yesterday, and the State Department said this weekend that both the United States and Russia conducted the maximum 18 inspections of each other’s nuclear arsenals during the treaty’s first year. The State Department also said that the U.S. and Russia conducted 1,800 data exchanges during the treaty’s […]

A Japanese delegation is visiting Hanford this week to exchange information with experts across the Department of Energy complex to help with cleanup following the Fukushima nuclear disaster. “The Energy Department’s environmental cleanup mission is one of the world’s largest programs of its type and a key element of the program’s success to date has […]

Deputy Secretary of Energy Dan Poneman said Friday that some advocates of a “gold standard” for civil nuclear agreements that would require other countries to forgo enrichment and reprocessing have distorted the facts. “The relationship between 123 agreements and our restrictions on exporting enrichment and reprocessing technologies has unfortunately been mischaracterized,” Poneman said at the […]

As Japan moves forward with tackling the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster, the governor of the Fukushima province is interested in learning more about cleanup approaches from U.S. firms. Governor Yuhei Sato is inviting U.S. cleanup companies to travel to Japan to brief him and his staff in mid-to-late March, according to […]

In an effort to mirror the relationship between National Nuclear Security Administration weapons laboratories and their United Kingdom counterparts, the agency’s weapons program has created a liaison between the agency’s production plants and the UK’s Atomic Weapons Establishment, filling the position with former Y-12 National Security Complex and headquarters official Brenda Hunter. According to the […]

Ian Hudson from the U.K. Nuclear Decommissioning Authority is set to join URS as its new Vice President of U.S. Performance Assurance, effective in late March. At the NDA, Hudson served as Program Director for the Sellafield site, where URS is the lead company in contractor Nuclear Management Partners. In his new role, Hudson will […]

The Obama Administration’s decision to not force countries to foreswear enrichment and reprocessing technologies as part of future civil nuclear cooperation deals is drawing criticism from Congress, and especially Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.). Lugar, the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, responded to a letter to Congress from the Administration describing its plans […]

A group of public health, medical, and nuclear non-proliferation experts sent a letter to U.S. lawmakers yesterday urging them to amend pending legislation to restrict the use of the medical isotope molybdenum-99 produced by Russia. In the Jan. 17 letter to Reps. Jeff Fortenberry (R-Neb.), Fred Upton (R-Mich.) and Ed Market (D-Mass.), the group of […]

The UK’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority has selected Babcock Dounreay Partnership—made up of Babcock Nuclear Services Ltd, CH2M Hill and URS Holdings (UK) Ltd.—as the preferred bidder in the competition to take ownership of Dounreay Site Restoration Limited, after a two-year public procurement process. The Babcock team beat out the other prequalified team of Caithness Solutions, made […]

Russia is no longer beneath the 1,550-warhead cap set by the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, according to semiannual data released about U.S. and Russian weapons required under the treaty. As of Sept. 1, Russia was deploying 1,566 nuclear weapons, up from 1,537 Feb. 1. Both countries have to be under the treaty’s 1,550-warhead cap […]

With the $88 billion plan to modernize the nation’s weapons complex and nuclear arsenal on the Congressional chopping block, senior Administration officials yesterday sought to create separation between the New START Treaty from the modernization plan that was generated during debate on the treaty, suggesting during a House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee hearing that […]