Publications: ExchangeMonitor Morning Briefing

A New England conservation group last week added its voice to the growing chorus of opposition to Holtec International’s strategy for dealing with irradiated wastewater from a shuttered Massachusetts nuclear power plant. The Boston-based Conservation Law Foundation (CLF) urged Holtec “to abandon all plans” to release water from Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station into the nearby […]

Note from Benjamin S. Weiss, Exchange Monitor’s civilian nuclear power reporter. Good morning from sunny Summerlin, Nevada, just outside Las Vegas, where the Exchange Monitor’s annual Decommissioning Strategy Forum will begin at 1:00 p.m. Pacific, 3:00 p.m. Eastern time.  Look for a daily dispatch of the two-day event’s proceedings, including industry and government speakers discussing […]

The Arms Control Association’s annual meeting was scheduled to begin in Washington Thursday morning, with addresses from U.S. and U.N. officials planned throughout the proceedings, the disarmament-advocating group said. The Washington-based non-government group was scheduled to hold the meeting at the National Press Club in Washington, a few blocks from the White House, beginning at […]

After working out various kinks since late December, the Department of Energy has resumed its demonstration run of the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit at the Idaho National Laboratory, a spokesperson said Wednesday. Following a successful heat-up, waste simulant processing resumed on May 23, a DOE spokesperson said in an email. The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety […]

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D) planned to visit the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site Thursday and will be joined by officials from the Washington state Department of Ecology, according to an advisory issued through the governor’s office Wednesday. Ecology Director Laura Watson and the state’s agency’s nuclear waste program manager David Bowen will join Inslee […]

The company behind an advanced reactor design insisted Wednesday that its technology was misrepresented by a scathing university report published earlier this week. NuScale’s small modular reactor (SMR) design “does not create waste and material streams that are novel to the nuclear power industry,” a spokesperson for the company told Exchange Monitor in a statement […]

In early fall, Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff will recommend whether the civilian nuclear energy regulator should overhaul federal rules about securing special nuclear material, an agency official said during a public meeting on Wednesday. Staff were due to turn in their notation vote paper to the commission by September, said Marshall Kohen, a technical assistant […]

Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash), whose 4th Congressional district in Washington state includes the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site, is facing multiple fellow Republicans, one of them a former NASCAR driver and another backed by former President Donald Trump, in an August primary, according to Ballotpedia.org. Jerrod Sessler is the best-funded of the four Republican challengers […]

The Department of Energy is considering the California governor’s request to alter the agency’s multibillion-dollar nuclear power bailout to allow a plant in the Golden State to apply for a payout, a spokesperson said Tuesday. DOE is “currently reviewing” Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D) May 23 letter to the agency asking it to loosen restrictions on […]

The Los Alamos National Laboratory’s new high-performance computing system, called Venado, assembled by Hewlett Packard and to be delivered in 2023, will be the first in the U.S. powered by the Grace central processing unit designed by Nvidia, the lab said. The lab announced the impending delivery of its next high-performance computer system last week […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration’s airborne, radiation-sniffing Nuclear Emergency Support Team was to begin the first of four days of background sampling over Los Angeles on Wednesday ahead of the Ninth Summit of the Americas, the agency said. Ahead of the meeting of government, industry and community representatives from each American continent, a low-flying National […]

Following the solicitation of new long-term contracts for its Portsmouth and Paducah sites, the Department of Energy plans to extend the incumbents at both sites for up to six months, according to procurement notes published recently.  In a procurement notice Friday, the DOE’s Office of Environmental Management announced its intent to extend decontamination and decommissioning […]

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission says continued storage of potentially-combustible transuranic waste at Waste Control Specialists in Andrews County, Texas until Dec, 31, 2024, should not result in a significant environmental impact. The Friday finding of no significant impact in the Federal Register clears the way for continued stopgap storage of up to 74 remaining containers […]

Results of a recent Stanford University-led study ran counter to the nuclear industry’s claims that advanced reactors won’t significantly add to radioactive waste stockpiles around the world, the university said in a press release published Monday. According to Stanford’s statement, the study — due to eb published Monday in the academic journal Proceedings of the […]

The Defense Waste Processing Facility at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina has entered an outage this month as it prepares to switch over from formic acid to glycolic acid by October. Going with glycolic acid at the Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF) should lead to more efficient conversion of radioactive […]

Here are some events related to defense and civilian matters that Exchange Monitor staff are tracking this week: June 01: Meeting. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. “Transformation at the NRC—Sustaining Progress as Modern, Risk-Informed Regulator.” In person at NRC headquarters, Commissioners’ Conference Room, 11555 Rockville Pike, Rockville, Md. and streaming online at 10 a.m. Eastern time. 02: […]

The on-again, off-again demonstration run of the Department of Energy’s Integrated Waste Treatment Unit at the Idaho National Laboratory should be on again in June, according to a federal nuclear-safety overseer. After an outage during March and April, the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit (IWTU) was to begin heating up in early May, according to a […]

Bids for Long-term Management and Storage of elemental mercury are due to the Department of Energy by 4 p.m. Eastern Time Wednesday, while questions on the last week’s solicitations for new contracts at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio and the Paducah Site in Kentucky are due a week later, the agency said. Since DOE’s Office […]

The leader of the House Armed Services Committee said Monday he sees “tough fights” ahead over President Biden’s proposals to cut the Navy’s nuclear-tipped sea-launched cruise missile program and retire B-83 gravity bombs as Congress takes up the next defense policy bill. Committee chair Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) said he agreed with both policy proposals […]

The head of the Department of Energy’s Environmental Management field office at Los Alamos National Laboratory lavished praise on 1,000 firefighters who battled the Cerro Pelado wildfire in New Mexico, which as of Wednesday was 92% contained. The residents who lived through major past fires in the region went through “a traumatic experience,” said environmental […]

The state of California Monday asked the Department of Energy to alter requirements for its recently-unveiled nuclear bailout to ensure the Golden State’s last operating nuclear power plant is eligible for an award during the agency’s first funding cycle. DOE’s April guidelines for its roughly $6 billion civil nuclear credits program present “overly broad” restrictions […]

The Department of Energy on Wednesday opened bidding for a pair of new long-term contracts to manage Cold War uranium-enrichment cleanup in Ohio and Kentucky, one of which includes some work for active nuclear weapons programs.  The agency’s Office of Environmental Management, the nuclear-weapons cleanup steward, posted final solicitations online. The scheduled last day for […]

The Court of Federal Claims should let the Department of Energy sunset Swift & Staley’s existing contract for landlord services at the Paducah Site in Kentucky by May 31, 2023, the federal government repeated this week. Swift & Staley is the incumbent on the contract and had won a follow-on award to continue providing these […]

United Cleanup Oak Ridge this week started work under the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Reservation Cleanup Contract, potentially worth up to $8.3 billion over 10 years. The Amentum-led United Cleanup Oak Ridge (UROR) includes partners Jacobs Engineering and Honeywell International with teaming subcontractors RSI EnTech, Strata-G, Longnecker & Associates and Environmental Alternatives. The company […]

Keeping California’s last nuclear power plant online would be “an outrage and a betrayal,” a coalition of anti-nuclear groups told the state governor in a letter last week, as the Golden State pondered whether to press for a federal bailout for the facility. Keeping Diablo Canyon Power Plant online past its scheduled 2025 shutdown date […]