Nuclear Weapons & Stockpile

SUN VALLEY, IDAHO — Advanced nuclear companies hoping to tap into big pools of funding for their projects need to bring more than good ideas to the table, J.P. Morgan’s lead energy executive said here Tuesday. “I think, first and foremost, what people need to show us is that they have a company,” said Jay […]

The Joe Biden administration’s nominee to lead nuclear weapons programs at National Nuclear Security Administration headquarters was one of four nominees approved unanimously on Tuesday by the Senate Armed Services Committee. Marvin Adams got the nod from the committee just under four months after the White House announced Biden’s intent to install the Texas A&M […]

Marvin Adams, the Joe Biden administration’s to lead the National Nuclear Security Administration’s defense programs from agency headquarters, has the support of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s powerful Republican ranking member.  Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) “expects to support this nomination when the committee votes,” a spokesperson for committee Republicans wrote Monday in an email.  Adams, […]

SUN VALLEY, IDAHO — Young people are more interested in building out zero-carbon energy technologies like advanced nuclear reactors than addressing spent nuclear fuel storage, an advanced reactor company executive said here Monday. People under 35 are more concerned about “waste from a tailpipe” than they are about waste from nuclear power plants, X-Energy CEO […]

The Joe Biden administration last week requested a budget of $41 million for the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board in fiscal 2023, an increase of $5 million over $36 million from the 2022 omnibus passed in early March. That 2023 request is about a 14% year-over-year increase for the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB). […]

NuScale Power, a developer of small modular reactors, has received a new $10 million injection of cash. That increases the amount of new investments in NuScale up to $453 million in the past few months. The new money comes from an eight-year-old San Francisco-based investment firm SailingStone Partners. SailingStone is a subsidiary of Houston based […]

National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Administrator Jill Hruby spent some time at the Nevada National Security Site this week, according to a series of posts on official agency Twitter accounts. Hruby visited the site along with members of the NNSA Council, which includes representatives of several nuclear-weapon sites.   The NNSA said this week it […]

By Dan Parsons The National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) Office of Counterterrorism and Counterproliferation, or NA-80, recently embarked the second and final phase of a refresh for its Nuclear Emergency Support Team (NEST) air fleet: airplanes and helicopters the agency uses to gather data about nuclear accidents, incidents and potential radiological terror attacks. This week, […]

A report on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s environmental justice efforts based on a months-long review process is ready for agency leadership to look over, a spokesperson said this week. The environmental justice review team, led by Gregory Suber, deputy chief of NRC’s operating reactor licensing division, sent its findings to the commission Tuesday, an agency […]

Happy Friday, nuke-watchers. Here are some other stories RadWaste Monitor was tracking across the civilian nuclear power space this week. Russian garrison at Chernobyl hands plant back to Ukraine, IAEA says Russian forces occupying the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant packed up and left late this week, leaving the site in the hands of Ukrainian operators, […]

The Department of Energy is looking for someone within the agency to run the Office of Nuclear Energy’s spent nuclear fuel programs, according to an internal job listing obtained last week by RadWaste Monitor. According to the posting, DOE is hiring a 120-day detail for the Senior Executive Service (SES) position of assistant secretary for […]

The new liquid waste contractor at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina is taking charge of the Salt Waste Processing Facility, an agency spokesperson confirmed Monday. The transition to BWX Technologies-led Savannah River Mission Completion from Parsons Government Services, which built and started up the Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF), began […]

As of March 9, 427 intermodal containers filled with radiologically-contaminated soil or debris had been shipped to EnergySolutions from the Balance of Site Facilities cleanup at the West Valley Demonstration Project in New York, a contractor representative told the West Valley Citizen Task Force meeting last week. Kelly Wooley, deputy general manager for the West […]

A Hanford occupational health contractor agreed to pay almost $3 million in restitution and penalties for false financial statements that enabled it to obtain a COVID-related loan from the U.S. Small Business Administration, which was later forgiven. The loan ended up in the personal bank accounts of the owners of HPMCorp., Holly and Grover Cleveland […]

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management logged 21 confirmed cases of COVID-19 during the past week, a decrease of 14 from the prior week’s total of 35, a spokesperson for the organization said Thursday by email. Two weeks ago the weekly confirmed number was 43, a fraction of the high of 775 for […]

Construction of the 200 Mercury Treatment Facility at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee is now 40% complete, an agency spokesperson said by email Wednesday. The project includes building a treatment facility, headworks facility, and a 3,000-foot pipeline connecting the two facilities.  “Crews are currently installing floors and walls at the treatment […]

The Department Energy’s nuclear remediation branch would see its total funding slide to $7.64 billion under the Joe Biden administration’s budget request for fiscal 2023, down from almost $7.9 billion appropriated for fiscal 2022. If Congress approved the requested funding, it would return the DOE Office of Environmental Management to roughly its fiscal 2021 appropriation.  […]

The Department of Energy is apparently not counting upon a speedy resolution of litigation surrounding the landlord services contract for the Paducah Site, as a spokesperson confirmed Thursday the incumbent is receiving a four-month extension. Kentucky-based Swift & Staley is now scheduled to stay on the job through July 31, a spokesperson for the DOE […]

Anne Marie White, the last Senate-confirmed assistant secretary for the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management, is opening a new distillery in her hometown in Michigan. White and Scott Anderson, another longtime hand on the old DOE weapons complex, will soon open “The Honorable Distillery” in a renovated movie theater in downtown Marquette, Mich., […]

The story “Fed review of RLUOB recategorization in May” [Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor, Vol. 26, No. 11] should have said the Radiological Laboratory/Utility/Office Building can legally accept just under 40 grams of plutonium at once.

Centrus Energy was to have its new enrichment cascade for high assay low-enriched uranium ready to start up by Thursday, according to recent regulatory filings by the Bethesda, Md., company. The uranium fuel broker and enrichment technology developer appended a letter contract with the Department of Energy to its latest 10-K filing with the Securities […]

A one-page Department of Defense fact sheet issued this week appeared to confirm that President Joe Biden would not declare a no-first use of nuclear weapons policy. “As long as nuclear weapons exist, the fundamental role of U.S. nuclear weapons is to deter nuclear attack on the United States, our allies, and partners,” reads the […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration has requested a roughly 60% increase in fiscal year 2023 for the part of its budget that funds the rebuilding of critical nuclear-weapons production infrastructure including plutonium pits, a Department of Energy document published Tuesday shows. The semiautonomous DOE nuclear-weapons agency seeks some $4.6 billion for Production Modernization in fiscal […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) Office of Counterterrorism and Counterproliferation, or NA-80, recently embarked on the second and final phase of a refresh for its Nuclear Emergency Support Team (NEST) air fleet: planes and helicopters the agency uses domestically to gather data about potential or suspected nuclear accidents, incidents and — in a worst […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration has requested a roughly 60% increase in fiscal year 2023 for the part of its budget that funds the rebuilding of critical nuclear-weapons production infrastructure including plutonium pits, a Department of Energy document published Tuesday shows. The semiautonomous DOE nuclear-weapons agency seeks some $4.6 billion for Production Modernization in fiscal […]

While the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state would receive a haircut under the fiscal 2023 budget request rolled out Monday by President Joe Biden’s administration, a citizen group leader expects Congress will beef up the cleanup appropriation for the former plutonium production facility. Funding for the Richland Operations Office would be $818 […]

The Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons budget would get a small bump for fiscal year 2023 while its nuclear waste budgets would fall a little year-over-year, under a White House budget proposal released Monday. The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) would receive about $21.5 billion for fiscal year 2023, some $750 million more than the […]

As of March 9, 427 intermodal containers filled with radiologically-contaminated soil or debris had been shipped to EnergySolutions from the Balance of Site Facilities cleanup at the West Valley Demonstration Project in New York, a contractor representative told the West Valley Citizen Task Force meeting last week. Kelly Wooley, deputy general manager for the West […]

The Hanford Advisory Board again stressed its concerns about leaking tanks in two pieces of written advice sent to the U.S. Department of Energy on Thursday. In the second day of a virtual meeting, the board voted to tell DOE that it wants the feds to prioritize removal of 3.37 million gallons of liquid wastes […]

The Wall St. Journal reported Friday that President Joe Biden’s nuclear posture review will call for canceling both a planned nuclear-tipped, sea-launched cruise missile slated to use a modified W80-4 warhead and a life extension program for the megaton-capable B83 gravity bomb.  The Journal also reported that the Biden posture review would not declare that […]