Publications: ExchangeMonitor Morning Briefing

The full Senate Tuesday voted 54-to-41, mostly upon party lines, to confirm the nomination of Patricia Lee, a manager at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina, to be a member of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board.  The final vote was tallied shortly after 3:00 p.m. Eastern time. The Senate […]

The Air Force’s next-generation nuclear-tipped, silo-based intercontinental ballistic missile will continue but will be drastically restructured amid further cost increases and schedule delays announced Monday by the Department of Defense.  The new overall cost estimate for Sentinel is $140.9 billion: 81% higher than the September 2020 estimate when the program entered its manufacturing phase and […]

The Senate Armed Services Committee’s version of a must-pass defense policy bill would again authorize more than $7 billion for the Department of Energy to carry out Defense Environmental Cleanup at nuclear weapons complex sites. Language in the nearly 1,200-page bill would also allow the secretary of energy to accelerate cleanup at nuclear facilities if […]

The Senate Armed Services Committee wants to require the Department of Energy to pick two to four possible sites for a new domestic uranium enrichment facility for defense programs, according to a bill report published Monday. The report was appended to the panel’s version of the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which the Senate […]

In Iran’s election run-off Friday, Iran’s citizens voted in a candidate that promised in his campaign to negotiate with the U.S. and Europe on nuclear activities again, media outlets reported. Masoud Pezeshkian, a lawmaker and heart surgeon, defeated conservative opponent Saeed Jalili narrowly — with only 50% voter turnout nationwide — on the campaign of […]

Complex-wide plutonium modernization is up slightly, with Los Alamos plutonium funding shifting to operations from modernization, in the House’s first draft of the Department of Energy’s 2025 budget. The full House Appropriations Committee was to debate and vote on the legislation Tuesday during a multi-bill markup scheduled to begin on Capitol Hill at 9:00 a.m. […]

The Department of Energy’s $8-billion nuclear cleanup branch has started implementing some best practices sought by the Government Accountability Office but still has far to go, according to a report out Monday. The DOE Office of Environmental Management “is updating its site-specific life-cycle cost and schedule estimates to use as baselines to track progress and […]

Richland, Wash., where the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site is based, will see daytime highs above 100-degrees Fahrenheit this week, according to the National Weather Service. According to the forecast, the high Monday could hit 106 degrees followed by 110 degrees Tuesday. An “excessive heat warning” is in effect through Wednesday at 10 p.m. Pacific […]

A subprogram responsible for consent-based siting of spent nuclear fuel from power plants would drop by more than half if a bill scheduled for a committee vote Tuesday becomes law. The Integrated Waste Management System (IWMS) within the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy would get $25 million for fiscal year 2025, $30 million […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration will conduct low-altitude helicopter flights July 9-11 over Milwaukee, Wis., to detect radiation threats during the Republican National Convention, the agency said in a press release. The Nuclear Energy Support Team’s (NEST) aircraft, a twin-engine Bell-412 with radiation sensing technology, will scan for background radiation by flying in a grid […]

Key environmental construction projects are nearly complete at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state and its Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, and that’s reflected in a House Appropriations funding plan for fiscal 2025. The budget proposal, details of which House appropriators released Monday in a bill report, was scheduled to be marked up […]

The Department of Energy seeks industry input about a long-term contract to design, build, license and operate a federally owned interim storage site for spent nuclear fuel, according to a notice released last week. Responses to the request for information are due Sept. 6, the Friday after the U.S. Labor Day holiday. DOE released the […]

The House Appropriations Committee will mark up Tuesday a bill that would authorize a 2% year-over-year raise for the National Nuclear Security Administration and keep nuclear-weapons cleanup at the Department of Energy about flat in fiscal year 2025. The full-committee markup was scheduled for 9:00 a.m. Eastern time in the Rayburn House Office Building, room […]

Environmental groups had standing to challenge a utility’s request to renew its operating license for California’s Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant but the groups’ complaints are inadmissible, a Nuclear Regulatory Commission board ruled. “With this Order, we chronicle yet another chapter in the ongoing narrative of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant,” the Atomic Safety […]

Groups in Colorado, South Carolina and Washington state each got 12-month grants from the Energy Communities alliance, worth up to $150,000 each, to develop public engagement processes for nuclear-waste management. The Energy Communities Alliance (ECA), based in the Washington, D.C., area, announced the grants in a press release July 2, before the U.S. Independence Day […]

In notices last week, the Department of Energy said it plans to again extend incumbent cleanup contractors at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio and the Paducah Site in Kentucky for up to a year. DOE published a notice of intent July 2 to extend the Decontamination & Decommissioning services contract held by Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth for […]

State emergency management coordinators in South Carolina will receive a $2.4-million grant from the Department of Energy to enhance emergency preparedness at DOE’s Savannah River Site, the federal agency announced Friday. The five-year grant to the South Carolina Emergency Management Division runs from July 5, 2024, through June 30, 2029, according to a DOE press […]

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission will not exempt from environmental review Holtec International’s plan to restart the Palisades Nuclear Generating Station in Michigan, the agency said last week. Holtec wants to restart the plant, which closed two years ago, in August 2025 and had asked NRC for what is known as a categorical exemption from environmental […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration’s largest ever carbon-pollution-free procurement would be a partnership with Los Alamos that aims to provide two Department of Energy labs in New Mexico with electricity from solar energy, the agency said Thursday. The project — called the Los Alamos County Foxtail Flats Solar and Storage Project — will notionally be […]

The Washington state Department of Ecology in June formally signed off on a Department of Energy plan to solidify into a concrete-like grout up to 2,000 gallons of low-level liquid radioactive waste from the Hanford Site. Filtering of cesium and other radionuclides, what DOE calls pretreatment, will happen onsite at the former plutonium production complex, […]

Leidos-led Hanford Mission Integration Solutions, the contractor for roads, grounds and essential infrastructure-related chores at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site, appointed Todd Synoground acting chief operations officer. Synoground, listed as senior vice president of infrastructure and site services on the contractor’s website, will step in as acting operations chief with Amy Basche moving up […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration will host diplomats at Sandia National Laboratories and Nevada National Security Sites in July with aims to be transparent about its activities and its moratorium on nuclear testing. The National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) labs will host diplomats from the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban-Treaty Organization, as well as the United Arab […]

Meeting IAEA’s 2023 nuclear projections of doubling the world’s nuclear power capacity by 2050 will require doubling investments in nuclear power to $100 billion U.S. dollars annually, the International Atomic Energy Agency said Friday.  Countries seeking to add nuclear energy to their arsenal need technical and financial expertise through deployment of nuclear energy and low […]

The California legislature last week passed a bill that would give Pacific Gas & Electric $400 million more to keep the Diablo Canyon Power Plant open for the rest of the decade. The funding, which Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) proposed, is part of the state’s annual budget bill. The legislature initially rejected Newsom’s proposal to […]

Owen Barwell will take over as chief financial officer of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on July 14, the agency announced last week. NRC’s chief financial officer (CFO) is responsible for the management and auditing of the agency’s finances and is the five-member commission’s top financial policy adviser. Barwell was most recently CFO of Independence Hydrogen, […]

The Department of Energy’s Carlsbad Field Office in New Mexico and the prime contractor for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant will hold the next town-hall-style public meeting at the end of July. The hybrid meeting will provide an update on disposal of defense-related transuranic waste and related issues at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), […]