Publications: ExchangeMonitor Morning Briefing

A U.S. Senator asked Tuesday if a planned manufacturing plant in Kansas poses a threat to the National Nuclear Security Administration’s nearby factory in Missouri for non-nuclear nuclear-weapon components. The conservative publication Daily Caller in December reported that Cnano Technology USA Inc., a company the publication said has ties to Chinese businesses, planned to build […]

Tennessee-based Boston Government Services said Monday it has hired a Leidos executive, Darrell Graddy, as chief strategy officer. Graddy spent eight years in Leidos involved in business development and project management and also spent 30 years in management roles at Lockheed Martin, Boston Government Services said in the press release. According to the release, Graddy […]

The Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, coming out of a maintenance outage, received 23 shipments of transuranic waste during the last half of March, according to online data. Because of the extended maintenance outage, which kept the underground salt mine offline all of February, shipment only resumed March 15. The […]

Inés Triay, one-time head of the Department of Energy’s nuclear cleanup branch, will discuss the hexavalent chromium plume at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico this week. Triay, currently interim dean of the College of Engineering and Computing at Florida International University, is leading an expert review team on the longstanding chromium plume […]

Kathryn Huff will leave the Department of Energy on May 3, only days before what would have concluded her third year at the top of the Office of Nuclear Energy. Huff shared the news in an email, which the Exchange Monitor saw on Monday. Her departure was first reported by Politico. Mike Goff, Huff’s deputy, […]

A Canadian municipality this week planned another step towards letting its citizens choose whether to host a deep geologic repository for spent nuclear fuel.  On Tuesday, the seven-member Council of the Corporation of the Municipality of South Bruce was scheduled to vote on the last procedural step needed to approve a ballot question about the […]

While the Department of Energy issued a request for qualifications for potential developers of solar projects at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, DOE expects to hold an information day soon on other carbon-free energy projects that would take longer to permit and build. The request for qualifications, published in March, supports DOE’s goal […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration on Monday planned to finish low-flying helicopter flights measuring radiation levels over the Boston Marathon route, the agency said in a press release. As it often does ahead of big-crowd events in public places, the agency’s Nuclear Emergency Support Team will measure radiation levels along the route to create a […]

A New Mexico resident is suing the Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories for slander, defamation, violation of the Freedom of Information Act and — causing the breakup of his 28-year marriage. William Gardner, who is representing himself, filed the action against DOE and Sandia last month. Gardner claims DOE falsely accused him of criminal […]

Here are some events related to defense and civilian nuclear matters that Exchange Monitor staff are tracking this week. 15-18: United States Nuclear Industry Council, Advanced Reactors Summit. Thompson Hotel Houston, Houston, Texas. Agenda and registration online. 17: Hearing, Senate Armed Services Committee. “To examine the Department of Energy and National Nuclear Security Administration atomic […]

Republican Jerrod Sessler, who is again mounting a primary challenge to Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.), picked up an expected albeit influential endorsement Friday from former president and presumptive GOP 2024 presidential nominee Donald Trump. Newhouse, who has used his House Appropriations Committee post to push for greater nuclear cleanup funding for the Department of Energy’s […]

The Amentum-led prime at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee told a federal appeals’ court this week its COVID-19 vaccination mandate fulfilled a contractual obligation to take “reasonable precautions” to protect worker health. UCOR’s contract with DOE, awarded in July 2010, required the Amentum-Jacobs joint venture to “take all reasonable precautions to […]

New Mexico and the Department of Energy will get until July 8 to continue settlement talks on revising a 2016 consent order governing legacy waste cleanup at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, a federal court said this week. U.S. Magistrate Judge John Robbenhaar issued a Monday order extending the timeline following the latest joint status […]

Party-line divisions about future spent nuclear fuel policies emerged in a Wednesday House hearing, during which one lawmaker said work on the issue could stretch into the next Congress. “I’m not for interim storage,” Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) said during the hearing of the House Energy climate, and grid security subcommittee, which he chairs. “I […]

Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) last week called on House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to bring to set a vote on S.3853, a bill to extend the Radiation Exposure Compensation Reauthorization Act, before it expires June 7. The Senate has done its job, Bush said, passing the bill by more than a two-thirds margin […]

The company that was to decommission the Palisades Nuclear Power Plant in Michigan inappropriately withdrew more than $160 million from the plant’s decommissioning trust fund and did not pay it back, environmental and anti-nuclear activists said Wednesday in a meeting with NRC staff. The activists said Wednesday that they had identified in public reports filed […]

The Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state has brought online the second melter at the multibillion-dollar facility designed to solidify liquid radioactive waste into a solid glass-like form, the agency said this week. DOE said in a Tuesday press release that the second 300-ton melter at Bechtel’s Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant has […]

Sam Randazzo, the disgraced former chair of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, is dead, media in Ohio reported Tuesday. Multiple reports said that Randazzo’s body was found late Tuesday morning in a Columbia warehouse that he owned. The Franklin County Coroners Office, which confirmed the death, said the case is a suspected suicide, according […]

In a legal brief filed in federal court, Department of Energy contractors said a Pike County, Ohio man waited too long, 15 years after being diagnosed with cancer, and more than four years after a local school closed, to allege the contractors contaminated the area around the Portsmouth Site. Plaintiff Joshua Shaw blames contractors at […]

The governors of Arizona and New Mexico wrote the White House Council on Environmental Quality this week urging the federal government to prioritize cleanup of old uranium mines in the Southwest, and appoint a regional coordinator. There are 650 abandoned uranium mines spread across the two states. Many date to the 1950s, before implementation of […]

The director of the Idaho national laboratory was one of four witnesses set to testify Wednesday before a House subcommittee in a hearing about spent nuclear fuel. The House Energy climate, and grid security subcommittee was set to gavel in at 10:30 a.m. Eastern time in Washington for a hearing titled “American Nuclear Energy Expansion: […]

The Department of Energy plans to use Aptim, one of nine companies selected in a national solicitation in 2020, as its decommissioning and demolition contractor for Building 281 at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. DOE published a justification for not doing additional competitive bidding for the work, worth up to $22.1 million, in […]

The centerpiece of a federal neutron research complex in Maryland will use highly enriched uranium fuel until at least 2030, according to a recent regulatory filing. That’s because the Department of Energy and its semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration have yet to develop a fuel the National Bureau of Standards Reactor (NBSR) can use, according […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration planned in June to award a one-year contract to study a pilot defense-uranium enrichment plant based on technology developed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the agency said Friday. The semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear weapons agency narrowed the timeline for the award in a question-and-answer document published on a […]

The Department of Energy is giving bidders on the $2.9-billion Portsmouth / Paducah Project Office (PPPO) Operations and Site Mission Support contract until April 17 to tweak their proposals, sources tell Exchange Monitor. The contract will cover running depleted uranium hexafluoride conversion plants in Ohio and Kentucky, among other things. April 17 is the deadline […]