Nuclear Weapons & Stockpile

John Gordon, the retired Air Force general who was deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency before becoming the first-ever administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), died Sunday. He was 73. Current NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty — no relation — was among those remembering the agency’s first leader Monday on Twitter. Some people […]

The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) has lost its game of chicken with the Pantex Plant in Texas, where personnel recently blocked a board inspector from attending a meeting of the secretive Nuclear Explosive Safety Study Group, according to a letter posted online. An employee for DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) blocked the […]

The Y-12 National Security Complex mistakenly sent improperly packaged radioactive waste to Nevada for six years because no one at the Oak Ridge, Tenn., site wrote strict rules for disposing of weapon-related materials, according to a new Department of Energy report.  From 2013 through December 2018, the National Nuclear Security Administration facility sent nine shipments containing […]

Federal agencies will gradually return to normal operations in parallel with the White House’s three-phase plan to reactivate the national economy as the COVID-19 pandemic recedes, the Trump administration said Monday. The guidance does not provide any set schedule for the process, but rather says agency heads must make decisions on reducing telework and fully […]

Not much sooner than Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette provided the guidance for doing so, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) added language to its prime contracts for major nuclear-weapon sites for billing the government for paid time off given to workers who couldn’t do their job because of COVID-19. The agency had not posted […]

The Energy Department Office of Environmental Management has scheduled an online pre-solicitation conference and one-on-one meetings on the Savannah River National Laboratory contract for next week. The virtual conference, conducted via WebEx, is scheduled for 11 a.m. April 28. The online meetings with potential bidders are planned for April 29 and, if necessary, April 30, […]

The Energy Department assured the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) on Thursday it would oversee remediation of recently discovered radioactive waste on former federal land near the site of a planned housing complex in Los Alamos County. Top brass for the Office of Environmental Management and the semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration at the Los […]

The Kansas City National Security Campus, the nation’s manufacturing hub for the non-nuclear components for nuclear weapons, said Monday it will take a baby step back toward normal operations during the COVID-19 pandemic by asking some people to return to work on-site. “The Kansas City National Security Campus is expanding its mission critical work activities,” […]

BWX Technologies said Monday it has appointed Robb LeMasters as senior vice president and chief strategy officer. He is scheduled to start work on July 13. LeMasters, well under 50, was the managing director at hedge fund Blue Harbour Group, whose owner announced its closure in February. LeMasters since 2015 has served on BWXT’s Board of […]

Naval Sea Systems Command on April 10 awarded General Dynamics Electric Boat a $56 million modification to manufacture another 18 missile tubes for the U.S. Columbia-class and U.K. Dreadnaught-class future ballistic missile submarines. The work on the joint U.S.-U.K. common missile compartment program is expected to be finished by May 2028. This modification was funded via U.K. […]

National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) sites logged more positive cases of COVID-19 this week, boosting the total number of confirmed infections in the civilian nuclear security enterprise beyond the half-century mark. The semiautonomous Department of Energy branch would not say how many new cases of the viral disease its plants, sites, and headquarters had racked […]

The COVID-19 pandemic has not stopped the Department of Energy’s plans to dispose of surplus plutonium, nor arguments in a long-running $200 million lawsuit on the matter with the state of South Carolina. The Department of Energy and South Carolina are actually close to settling the matter. However, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal […]

The members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Monday unanimously approved a license for the Department of Energy to export nearly 5 kilograms of weapon-grade uranium to Europe for production of medical isotopes. The four commissioners offered no comments on the matter before or after a roll-call vote on the memorandum and order. The document […]

The Air Force expects to award a contract for its next-generation intercontinental ballistic missiles on schedule, if not earlier, Assistant Secretary for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Will Roper said Thursday Despite the service and contractors enacting new teleworking policies and other social distancing efforts related to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) program […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) believes it can safely continue building the Uranium Processing Facility, and operate it starting this decade, after taking a court-ordered look at federal earthquake data from 2014. In a lawsuit filed by environmental groups, the U.S. District Court for Eastern Tennessee last year ordered the semiautonomous Department of Energy […]

BWX Technologies subsidiary Nuclear Fuel Services this week reported multiple cases of COVID-19 among its workforce. The Erwin, Tenn., defense-uranium contractor did not say how many employees were infected, or how many potentially exposed employees were in quarantine following contact with the sick workers. “Our coronavirus response protocols call for enhanced cleaning across the site, […]

The Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories has started offering limited COVID-19 tests for its employees, but it was unclear if the weapons engineering lab had tested anyone as of Friday. Sandia is also “entering into a contract” to provide tests for the general public, but “there’s some federal paperwork that has to be resolved” […]

The Department of Energy published guidance Wednesday for contractors that need to bill the government for paid time off given to employees unable to report for work due to COVID-19. The new guidance attempts to steer contracting officers through the process of modifying existing deals so that vendors can claim reimbursement under the $2.2 trillion CARES […]

With the United States probing the possibility of thawing the social freeze from the COVID-19 pandemic, the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories plan to start slowly ramping up on-site work this month. Los Alamos has been in a mission-critical operations posture since March, limiting on-site work to what Director Thomas […]

The members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Monday unanimously approved a license for the Department of Energy to export nearly 5 kilograms of weapon-grade uranium to Europe for production of medical isotopes. The four commissioners offered no comments on the matter before or after a roll-call vote on the memorandum and order. The document […]

The Energy Department’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina on Wednesday confirmed its sixth case of COVID-19, but noted that three previously infected employees have recovered and returned to work. The three others “are being monitored for a return to work within a week,” according to the press release from DOE’s office at Savannah River. […]

An employee at the Hanford Site in Washington state is being tested for COVID-19, the Department of Energy said in an overnight post. Cleaning procedures at the facility where the individual works, Building 6269, have been completed in keeping with standards from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Hanford management said in the notice. […]

The COVID-19 pandemic has not stopped the Department of Energy’s plans to dispose of surplus plutonium, nor arguments in a long-running $200 million lawsuit on the matter with the state of South Carolina. The Department of Energy and South Carolina are actually close to settling the matter. However, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal […]

The Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico said Monday it had evacuated its Building 954 and might do some deep cleaning there, after confirmed a case of COVID-19 among the workforce. The lab was at deadline determining which employees at Building 954 had been in contact with the infected recently, according to Sandia’s website. The building […]

The Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories started offering limited COVID-19 tests for its employees last week, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory could start testing this week, according to a senior state official. Sandia is for now only testing federal employees, contractors, and subcontractors at its Albuquerque campus, a spokesperson for the weapons-engineering lab […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) believes it can safely continue building the Uranium Processing Facility, and operate it starting this decade, after taking a court-ordered look at federal earthquake data from 2014. In a lawsuit filed by environmental groups, the U.S. District Court for Eastern Tennessee last year ordered the semiautonomous Department of Energy […]

The members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Monday unanimously approved a license for the Department of Energy to export nearly 5 kilograms of weapon-grade uranium to Europe for production of medical isotopes. The four commissioners offered no comments on the matter before or after the roll-call vote on the memorandum and order. The document […]

The Senate Armed Services Committee will continue to work toward its goal of completing its version of the fiscal 2021 National Defense Authorization Act markup by the end of May, but remains flexible “because of the uncertainty associated with the coronavirus in the weeks ahead,” spokeswoman Marta Hernandez said in the statement last week. “At […]

There were 51 confirmed cases of COVID-19 as of Friday among personnel working at sites housing National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) operations, up from 26 a week ago and nine the week before that. Spokespersons for the semiautonomous Department of Energy agency and its sites generally declined to say which cases were at which locations. But […]

The president of General Dynamics Electric Boat has tested positive for the COVID-19 virus while the company confirmed further changes to the workforce configuration to limit the disease’s spread within its facilities. In an April 4 message to employees, Electric Boat President Kevin Graney disclosed he has tested positive for the pandemic virus, noting his […]