Nuclear Weapons & Stockpile

PHOENIX — The Department of Energy manager for the Savannah River Site said Tuesday he would not be surprised if the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) one day assumes ownership of the operations contract for the South Carolina complex. The semiautonomous DOE nuclear-weapon steward is already funding more of the work at Savannah River, SRS […]

President Donald Trump on Thursday formally nominated Undersecretary of Energy Mark Menezes to the No. 2 position at the Department of Energy. If confirmed by the Senate, Menezes would assume the DOE deputy secretary position left vacant in December when Dan Brouillette was sworn in as secretary of energy. “Congratulations to my friend and colleague […]

House appropriators told the head of the Energy Department’s nuclear cleanup office on Wednesday that the budget cut proposed for fiscal 2021 will not stand, especially not at the Hanford Site in Washington state. The script is familiar by now, written at the beginning of the Donald Trump administration’s first term and played out already […]

The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) posted an open hearing that was scheduled for next week in Aiken, S.C., about the future of the Savannah River Site. The independent federal nuclear health and safety watchdog temporarily called off the event because of witness availability, and has not rescheduled it yet, a board spokesperson said […]

President Donald Trump on Thursday formally nominated Undersecretary of Energy Mark Menezes to the No. 2 position at the Department of Energy. If confirmed by the Senate, Menezes would assume the DOE deputy secretary position left vacant in December when Dan Brouillette was sworn in as secretary of energy. “Congratulations to my friend and colleague […]

By John Stang Incumbent David Wright and newcomer Christopher Hanson sailed through a Senate committee hearing Wednesday on their way toward confirmation as members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. In a nomination hearing, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee quizzed Hanson, Wright, and Douglas Benevento, the Trump administration’s candidate for deputy administrator at the Environmental […]

A working group of staff at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has recommended downshifting the standard schedule for inspections of spent reactor fuel storage pads from roughly every two years to three years. That was the No. 1 recommendation in the draft final version of Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installation (ISFSI) Inspection Enhancement Initiative, issued on […]

Staff at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Tuesday preliminarily recommended licensing a facility in New Mexico for temporary storage of spent fuel from U.S. nuclear power plants. The tentative support is provided in the draft environmental impact statement (EIS) for Holtec International’s planned consolidated interim storage facility (CISF) in Lea County, in the state’s southeast. […]

There are no known cases of COVID-19 at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory after an employee who reported exposure to the novel coronavirus tested negative for the disease, a lab spokesperson said Wednesday. “We’ve had no cases, confirmed or presumptive,” the spokesperson wrote in an email Wednesday evening. Livermore managers became aware last week of […]

Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-Calif.) latest legislative push to establish a pilot program for interim storage of radioactive waste got stuck in Senate gridlock this week when the big, bi-partisan energy bill stalled out amid a fight about climate change. Feinstein’s proposal was one of many amendments being balled up into a legislative package known as […]

An Idaho congressman on Tuesday said he believes Congress again will choose to keep a nuclear cleanup program with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, instead of allowing it to be transferred to the Department of Energy. The program is the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program (FUSRAP), which manages remediation of properties contaminated from […]

Staff at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Tuesday preliminarily recommended licensing a facility in New Mexico for temporary storage of spent fuel from U.S. nuclear power plants. The tentative support is provided in the draft environmental impact statement (EIS) for Holtec International’s consolidated interim storage facility in Lea County, in the state’s southeast. “Based on […]

The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) on Tuesday canceled a planned March 19 open hearing in Aiken, S.C., about the future of the Savannah River Site. The independent federal nuclear health and safety watchdog called off the event because of witness availability, a board spokesperson said.  The DNFSB had proposed witnesses including: William (Ike) […]

A federal judge last week dismissed a discrimination lawsuit filed by a former employee of the security contractor at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina, ruling there was no proof race played a role in the worker’s termination. In the March 6 order, U.S. District Judge Terry Wooten ruled in favor […]

PHOENIX – The Department of Energy manager for the Savannah River Site said Tuesday he would not be surprised if the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) one day assumes ownership of the operations contract for the South Carolina complex. The semiautonomous DOE nuclear-weapon steward is already funding more of the work at Savannah River, SRS […]

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission in January spent just $219 of its remaining balance from the Nuclear Waste Fund. That left the agency with a balance of $430,978 from the fund intended to pay for a national repository for high-level waste from defense nuclear operations and spent fuel from commercial nuclear power plants. “While there are […]

The administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration should serve a fixed term, a National Academies panel said Monday in an interim report on a four-and-a-half-year study into nuclear security governance. The National Academies panel did not say how long the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) should serve, but the group did […]

Amid the continuing spread of COVID-19, the novel coronavirus disease, the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapon-design laboratories have canceled the unclassified 2020 Strategic Weapons in the 21st Century summit scheduled for Thursday in Washington, D.C. This would have been the 13th year for the annual summit, co-hosted by the Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos national […]

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday told senators on March 5 industry is ready for and able to build two Virginia-class attack submarines (SSNs) in fiscal 2021, while the administration’s budget request funded only one. The Navy is under a Block V multiyear procurement contract that covers nine vessels with an option for a 10th. […]

Someone at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California was exposed to COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus that broke out in 2019, local media reported last week. A Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) employee exposed to someone with the disease is now self-monitoring at home, along with more than a dozen other […]

A working group of staff at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has recommended downshifting the standard schedule for inspections of spent reactor fuel storage pads from roughly every two years to three years. That was the No. 1 recommendation in the draft final version of Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installation (ISFSI) Inspection Enhancement Initiative, issued Friday. […]

The New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) has raised a long list of concerns about a draft of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s environmental impact statement for a planned used nuclear fuel storage facility in the state. Even as Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) and other state leaders have objected to the project from energy technology company […]

An Energy Department working group is still grappling with recommended changes on management of the payments in lieu of taxes (PILT) program for communities around nuclear facilities, Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette said Feb. 27. During a hearing of the House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee, the secretary promised to personally brief Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) […]

Jury selection and trial are slated for late June in a $75,000 negligence lawsuit against the management and operations contractor for the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina. According to a scheduling order filed Friday, Henry Bradley’s case against Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS) will head to trial on or after June […]

As budget hearing season ramps up in Washington, D.C., hearings of a different kind are scheduled elsewhere in two court cases touching the nuclear security enterprise: one involving a former Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist who pleaded guilty to lying about ties to China, another involving weapon-usable plutonium sent to Nevada for safekeeping. First, Turab […]

Age, like the budget, is sometimes just a number, as Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) hopes to prove in a sixth Senate term, candidacy for which the pro-nuclear Armed Services chair announced this week in an ad that appeared to feature him flying upside down in an airplane. Inhofe famously has said he will stop running […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is contemplating ways to cope with further spread of the novel coronavirus that broke out in China last year, potentially including postponing conferences and other events, a spokesperson said Thursday. The agency “has established a Unified Coordination Group from throughout the agency to assess the potential effect of a […]

Future efforts to secure Russian nuclear material left after from the Cold War are likely to bear little resemblance to the gold-standard programs of the past, if any get off the ground in the current era of significantly worsened relations between Washington and Moscow, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in a recent report. “[T]he […]

WASHINGTON — At Congress’ direction, the Department of Energy is revising a controversial order that curtailed the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board’s (DNFSB) access to nuclear sites and personnel, Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette said Thursday. “We’re in the process of revising the order and I will be meeting with the DNFSB and we’ll have […]

Two of the Senate’s reliable nuclear skeptics last week asked the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to investigate the budget increase the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is seeking for the 2021 fiscal year. Among other things, the GAO should determine why the semiautonomous Department of Energy agency’s Weapons Activities budget needs a much greater increase […]