Publications: ExchangeMonitor Morning Briefing

Though the National Nuclear Security Administration plans to dramatically ramp up plutonium pit production around the time a key arms control treaty expires in 2026, there are no plans to test fire any weapons, agency Administrator Jill Hruby said Monday in New Mexico. Hruby sat through two hours of questioning – and occasional haranguing – […]

The Department of Energy said Tuesday it is renewing its financial assistance, worth about $3.9-million, to the Washington, D.C.-based Energy Communities Alliance through April 11, 2028. The DOE Office of Environmental Management announced the reupping of the non-competitive financial assistance cooperative agreement with the community advocacy organization in a Tuesday press release. As recipient of […]

Holtec on Friday filed a permit modification request with the Environmental Protection Agency aimed at assuaging the agency’s reservations about whether the company is allowed to discharge irradiated wastewater into Cape Cod Bay in Massachusetts. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) posted Holtec’s permit modification request, and some supporting documents, online this week. The agency in […]

The federal government will respond in fewer than two weeks to New Mexico’s request for major changes to the Department of Energy’s long-term transuranic waste disposal program in the state, a senior agency official said at a forum Tuesday night. The New Mexico Environment Department is considering a new 10-year hazardous waste permit for the […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration is hiring for senior acquisition and construction management professionals with imminent application deadlines.  Through Monday, the NNSA is accepting applications for a deputy associate administrator for partnership and acquisition services in Washington. Applications for this and other NNSA positions can be submitted through the federal government’s job site, USAjobs.gov. Last […]

Randall Hendrickson, acting head of regulatory and policy affairs for the Department of Energy’s nuclear cleanup office, is leaving the government to take a job in private industry, the agency said Tuesday. Hendrickson’s departure was announced in an email to DOE Office of Environmental Management staff by Jeff Avery, DOE’s principal deputy assistant secretary for […]

A bipartisan group of 10 senators, led by Sen. Shelley Capito (R-WVa.), on Monday published the text of a nuclear policy bill that among other things would extend a cap on industry liability for catastrophic nuclear accidents. The bill would extend the $13-billion liability cap known as the Price-Anderson Act by 20 years to 2045, […]

The Department of Energy is extending Swift & Staley as site services contractor at the Paducah Site in Kentucky through July 2024, the agency said in a procurement notice Monday. The move is meant to buy the DOE Office of Environmental Management time to recompete a contract agreement for the landlord services award made in […]

An employee at Los Alamos National Laboratory was blown off a ladder and severely burned in 2015 after spraying cleaning solutions on parts of a power substation that turned out to be electrified, according to a report on the incident published last week. After the resulting arc-flash, nine employees were sent to Los Alamos Medical […]

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission planned next week to formally declare its position on a major industry wish-list item: paying for maintenance of nuclear power plants with funds that are supposed to be reserved for tearing the plants down. During the virtual meeting scheduled for April 13, officials with the NRC’s Office of Nuclear Material Safety […]

The Department of Energy and a contractor await permission from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to return a problem transuranic waste container, now in a parking lot at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, back to the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, managers in Carlsbad, N.M., said recently. The issue came up […]

Howard Osborne will leave IBM to become chief financial officer of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on April 23, the agency said Monday in a press release. As chief financial officer, Osborne is responsible for the management and auditing of the agency’s finances and is the five-member commission’s top financial policy adviser. Osborne was most recently […]

Some parallel efforts by the National Nuclear Security Administration and Defense Department to secure nuclear materials around the globe may be redundant if their individual mission goals are not more clearly defined, the Government Accountability Office found in a new report.  The GAO looked into 23 separate NNSA and DoD programs and found that “some […]

Holtec Decommissioning International will participate in but not pay for an independent study of discharging wastewater from the shuttered Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Massachusetts into Cape Cod bay, the company told the state’s junior U.S. senator Friday. “We believe your independent panel will confirm the scientific facts to inform the public,” the company wrote […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration’s Production Office at the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas, will have a new manager as of May 21. Jason Armstrong, currently manager of the NNSA’s Savannah River Field Office, will take over as manager of the Pantex manager for the production office beginning May 21st. This does not include leadership of […]

Atomic Energy of Canada Limited is proceeding with previously-announced plans to seek bidders seeking to run Canadian Nuclear Laboratories, the federal Crown corporation said Friday. Canadian National Energy Alliance, an SNC-Lavalin-led team with Jacobs and Fluor as minority partners, currently runs daily operations of Canada’s national labs under a 10-year contract set to expire in […]

The Department of Energy will temporarily suspend some work to contain underground hexavalent chromium contamination at the Los Alamos National Laboratory while talks continue with New Mexico officials over the effectiveness of the process, officials said Wednesday night. The agency’s local Environmental Management field office and its site cleanup contractor will halt injection of clean […]

A federal magistrate judge was assigned to handle pre-trial matters in a racial discrimination lawsuit brought by an employee at the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico who claims he was unfairly bypassed for promotion by the former site management contractor. U.S. District Judge James Browning issued an order earlier this […]

The chair of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was preparing a response to a request by the governor of New Mexico that the commission stop working on a license for a proposed interim storage site in the state.  That’s according to a letter the NRC sent to Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) on Friday. The NRC […]

It will take about another $1.1 billion to completely decommission the Three Mile Island Unit-1 reactor in Pennsylvania, Constellation Energy Generation told the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in a new detailed cost estimate published Wednesday. The roughly 40-page updated site-specific decommissioning cost estimate for Three Mile Island Nuclear Station Unit-1 (TMI-1), appended to a letter signed […]

Centrus plans to introduce uranium hexafluoride into its new high assay, low enriched uranium cascade in Ohio around May 22, according to a letter to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission from the company.  The commission published the letter online Tuesday. The missive was dated March 23 and was signed by Mathew Snider, enrichment operations plant manager […]

The Biden Administration’s desire to cancel a new lower-yield nuclear submarine-launched cruise missile still doesn’t sit well with the leadership of the Senate Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee.  Both subcommittee Chair Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) and ranking member Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) support a submarine launched cruise missile tipped with a nuke, called SLCM-N, at […]

A New York town downstream from a shuttered nuclear power plant passed a resolution asking state lawmakers to make a proposed ban against discharging radioactive wastewater in the state stricter. The five-member Greenburgh Town Board approved the resolution over the weekend. The town in Westchester County, N.Y., over the northern border of the city borough […]

A few days before Christmas, the Department of Energy, together with the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency agreed to the broad framework for completing radioactive tank waste cleanup at the Savannah River Site. The primary goal of the revised Federal Facility Agreement, announced Tuesday, is to […]

Belgium can use low-enriched uranium to produce a valuable medical isotope instead of the highly-enriched uranium it used to import from the United States for that purpose, the National Nuclear Security Administration said Tuesday. Converting Belgium’s National Institute of Radioelements medical isotope production to low-enriched uranium was marked as a major nuclear non-proliferations milestone. More […]