Publications: ExchangeMonitor Morning Briefing

After nearly 30 years in Congress, Illinois Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.) won’t seek another term in the House, he told local media Monday. Rep. Rush, who was elected to serve Illinois’s 1st congressional district in 1992, won’t run for reelection in the 2022 midterms, he told the Chicago Sun-Times in an interview published Monday. Rush, […]

With litigation on a controversial contract award two years ago still ongoing, the Department of Energy has extended incumbent Swift & Staley as the landlord services provider at the Paducah Site in Kentucky through February, a spokesperson confirmed via email this week. Without the extension, first revealed in a U.S. Court of Federal Claims order, […]

The Department of Energy’s Environmental Management published draft solicitations Tuesday for two contracts potentially worth more than $7.7 billion combined at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio and the Paducah Site in Kentucky. The larger draft request for proposals (RFP) is for the potential $5.87-billion Portsmouth Decontamination and Decommissioning Contract, DOE said in a press release. […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration hopes its efforts to boost the domestic industry for Molybdenum-99 will result in commercial-scale availability of the medical isotope a couple years from now, according to an annual nonproliferation report the agency released before the holidays. Under its partnership with four U.S. companies the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) “aims […]

A lawsuit against the Nuclear Regulatory Commission over a proposed Texas interim storage facility for spent nuclear fuel sputtered back to life in the early days of 2022, recent court filings show. The suit, filed in February by a coalition of anti-nuclear groups including the Sierra Club, Beyond Nuclear and the Texas-based minerals company Fasken […]

One of the first big milestones in the frenzy of legal challenges to commercially operated interim storage sites for spent nuclear fuel is coming up in a few weeks in Albuquerque, where a federal judge was due to hear arguments for and against tossing a lawsuit against a proposed Holtec site in the state’s southeastern […]

Despite the still-raging pandemic, Holtec International’s decommissioning and advanced nuclear business lines had a pretty good year, the nuclear services company said in a roll-up press release Monday. The Camden, N.J., based Holtec moved 207 casks of spent nuclear fuel into dry storage at 21 plants around the world in 2021, the company said in […]

Nuclear Waste Partnership, the Amentum-BWX Technologies team that runs the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, won 62% of its subjective fee for fiscal year 2021 and 72% of its overall fee, according to a recently-released scorecard from the Department of Energy. The contractor took home about $3.3 million out of a potential $5.3 […]

The U.S. Supreme Court plans to hear oral arguments Friday in two cases concerning the federal government’s authority to require vaccination against COVID-19 in certain situations. In one case, President Joe Biden versus the state of Missouri and nine other states, the issue is whether federal entities including the Department of Health and Human Services […]

The Department of Energy has picked up the first two-year option in its agreement with HPM Corp., the incumbent provider of occupational medical services to thousands of federal and contractors at the Hanford Site in Washington state. The three-year base period of the potential seven-year, $152-million contract with Kennewick. Wash.,-based HPM Corp. (HPMC), was due […]

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is drawing up more questions about Holtec International’s proposed interim storage facility in New Mexico, an agency spokesperson said Monday. NRC staff are “still preparing” the agency’s third round of Requests for Additional Information (RAIs) for Holtec’s proposed interim storage site in Eddy County, N.M., a spokesperson told Exchange Monitor via […]

The five major nuclear-weapon states on Monday released a new statement about the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, the bedrock international accord that promotes the peaceful use of nuclear technology and a philosophy of defensive use of nuclear weapons. “We affirm that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.  […]

The new management team is in place at the Idaho National Laboratory, according to the Idaho Environmental Coalition’s website. The change was effective Jan. 1. The Idaho Environmental Coalition (IEC) has a potential ten-year, $6.4 billion contract and took  over from Fluor Idaho.  Ty Blackford is the president and program manager at the new team, […]

Before Christmas, a federal judge rejected a request from 292 workers at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site to temporarily block a COVID-19 vaccine mandate at the cleanup complex in Washington state, and lawyers had not filed new paperwork as of New Year’s. U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Rice in the Eastern District of Washington […]

A handful of employees at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee have until Tuesday to respond to their employer’s motion to dismiss a federal lawsuit about the lab’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate. Just after Christmas, on Dec. 27, U.S. District Judge Charles Atchley allowed the six employees of UT-Battelle, the University of […]

A federal district judge in South Carolina on Tuesday Dec. 28 refused to block the prime contractor at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina from carrying out its vaccine mandate against employees who refuse to take the shot against COVID-19. U.S. District Judge Michelle Childs said because Fluor-led Savannah River Nuclear […]

The Department of Energy’s Carlsbad Field Office in New Mexico has retained California-based Tetra Tech to work on a supplemental environmental impact statement and related documents for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. The agreement for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) documents is potentially worth $1.8-million, according to a Dec. 27 task order award notice […]

A National Nuclear Security Administration helicopter will sweep the Las Vegas strip through Dec. 31 to measure background radiation levels ahead of planned New Year’s Eve celebrations, the agency announced this week. Flights were scheduled to begin Dec. 29 and continue through Dec. 31. The agency’s Nuclear Emergency Support Team regularly takes background radiation measurements […]

There were 71 confirmed cases of COVID-19 among workers for the Department of Energy’s nuclear cleanup branch as of Dec. 16, down 16 from the prior week, a spokesperson for the office said in a Dec. 28 email. Also on Dec. 16 date, workers at DOE Office of Environmental Management sites had confirmed 7,416 cases […]

Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) died Tuesday, according to a statement from his family. Reid, who was Nevada’s longest-serving member of Congress, died “peacefully” Tuesday afternoon following a four-year battle with pancreatic cancer, his wife Landra Reid said in a statement. He was 82 years old. Reid was best known to nuke-watchers as […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration received the approval, though not the appropriation, to spend some $500 million more than requested for fiscal year 2022, under the National Defense Authorization Act signed into law Monday. Aside from allowing the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons agency to spend more than $20 billion — a sum House and […]

A federal judge will review the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s request to block a Texas minerals company’s bid to get involved with a state lawsuit over a proposed interim storage facility for spent nuclear fuel, recent court documents show. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals on Dec. 21 agreed to consider NRC’s motion to dismiss Fasken […]

The Department of Energy plans to extend its existing business agreement by one year with a contractor doing studies to support the federal agency’s remediation at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory in California, according to a procurement notice published Dec. 16. The DOE Office of Environmental Management published a justification on SAM.gov for extending a […]

A Department of Energy Office of Legacy Management program has identified 360 abandoned uranium mines on tribal lands across the western U.S. and is working with other government agencies to assess the safety and environmental risk posed by the sites, Legacy Management said in a press release this month. About 96% of the sites identified […]

The Department of Energy could solicit bids for long-term management and storage of elemental mercury in January, the Office of Environmental Management said in a procurement update after Christmas. After court action by gold mining companies forced DOE to drop earlier plans to designate Waste Control Specialists in West Texas as its preferred long-term storage […]