Publications: ExchangeMonitor Morning Briefing

Progressive leading lights in both houses of Congress led a letter-writing campaign urging President Joe Biden on Wednesday to use his imminent Nuclear Posture Review to cancel deployed and planned low-yield nukes. Canceling the planned low-yield, sea-launched nuclear-tipped cruise missile and shelving the W76-2 low-yield, submarine-launched ballistic missile warhead “would further signal that the United […]

Holtec International owes the feds another $50,000 stemming from security-related violations at a New Jersey nuclear plant under decommissioning, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced Wednesday. According to a Thursday press release from the agency, Holtec, which is dismantling Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station, will undertake “a series of corrective actions” designed to address this newest […]

A bill introduced in New Mexico’s state legislature last week, and backed by the governor, aims to block a proposed interim storage facility for spent nuclear fuel by banning the storage of high-level nuclear waste and spent fuel in the Land of Enchantment. If it became law, Senate Bill (SB) 54, introduced Jan. 19 by […]

The Department of Energy did not reject any information requests from the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board for the six-months ending Dec. 31, the safety watchdog told Congress this month, which amounts to zero refusals during the first year of the Joe Biden administration. “The Board has no denials of access to information to report […]

New Jersey’s economic development commission is appealing a recent court decision granting Holtec International a multi-million dollar state tax break, according to a recent court filing. According to a Jan. 20 appeal notice, viewed Wednesday by Exchange Monitor, the New Jersey Economic Development Authority (NJEDA) is challenging the Mercer County Superior Court’s Dec. 30 ruling […]

After an environmental group’s complaints, the company in charge of decommissioning a Michigan nuclear plant said in a Tuesday regulatory filing that it plans to switch the contractor for the job. Comprehensive Decommissioning International (CDI), part-owned by SNC-Lavalin and responsible for dismantling Palisades Nuclear Generating Station, will no longer be the project’s general contractor, Holtec […]

In addition to claiming more than 800,000 American lives, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused “massive economic disruptions in the public and private sector,” which bolsters the case for requiring most employees of federal contractors to be vaccinated, U.S. government attorneys said in a brief filed with the Eleventh U.S. Court of Appeals in Atlanta. The […]

The Salt Waste Processing Facility, offline since late October at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina, should restart in a couple of weeks, an executive with Parsons Corp., which built the plant told an advisory panel Tuesday. “We are shut down currently,” Mike Pittman, a Parsons vice president and project manager […]

After state lawmakers broke up his district, Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.), the chair of the Armed Forces panel that writes the first drafts of nuclear-weapon policy each year, will retire from Congress when his term ends in January 2023, he said Tuesday. “There’s no way, at least for me in this election cycle, but there […]

The Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina should be ready to start shipping certain transuranic waste from downblended plutonium to its underground disposal site in New Mexico by the end of the summer, an agency official told the Savannah River Site Citizens Advisory Board Tuesday. The Savannah River Site (SRS) goal is […]

A lawsuit filed in federal court last week aims to force the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to turn over more records related to a 2018 spent-fuel handling mishap at a California nuclear power plant under decommissioning, according to court records. The suit, filed Jan. 20 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California […]

A worker at the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s plutonium facility needed “outpatient treatment” after internal exposure to radiation following an apparent glovebox breach at the lab’s PF-4 plutonium facility on Friday, the lab said Monday. The employee was one of six members of the Los Alamos’ Materials Recovery and Recycle Aqueous Chloride Team who were […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration’s counterterrorism office planned to replace its Bell-made helicopters with a pair of Leonardo-made aircraft, according to a contract award posted online Monday. The roughly $35.5-million award covers “two (2) each Rotary Wing Aircraft in support of the [National Nuclear Security Administration] NNSA Office of Nuclear Incident Response” from  AgustaWestland Philadelphia […]

A U.S. district judge in Georgia, who last month blocked the Joe Biden administration from enforcing a COVID-19 vaccine mandate aimed at government contractors, declined Friday to wade into issues surrounding contractors that on their own require workers to be inoculated. At the same time, U.S. District Judge Stan Baker in the Southern District of […]

The Department of Energy’s $7.5-billion nuclear cleanup office appears to be inching closer to a small business solicitation for Technical Assistance Contracts for three or more field sites, according to a procurement website that went online within the past week. The Office of Environmental Management (EM) previously said in a Dec. 27 notice to expect […]

A federal court will rule on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s request to toss a state lawsuit over a proposed interim storage facility for spent nuclear fuel “as soon as possible,” according to minutes from a hearing held last week. The Jan. 20 hearing was the latest turn in New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas’s lawsuit […]

International efforts to develop strategies for disposing of nuclear waste have made strides recently, the U.N.’s nuclear energy organization said in a report published last week. “It is evident that significant progress has been made globally in formulating national policies and strategies and in implementing legal and regulatory systems that define responsibilities for the ongoing […]

After the omicron variant of COVID-19 delayed plans to return many workers to their offices, telework remained allowable and well-utilized for eligible employees across the civilian nuclear weapons complex last week, spokespersons said. As during the previous two years of the ongoing pandemic, policies were most liberal at the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) nuclear-weapons […]

Here are some events related to defense and civilian matters that the Exchange Monitor staff is tracking this week: January: 25: Savannah River Site Citizens Advisory Board. Meeting. 9 a.m. Eastern Time at Aiken, S.C. Municipal Building. Hybrid in-person and virtual, steaming on YouTube.  25: Secretary of Energy Advisory Board. Meeting. 9:30 a.m. Eastern time. […]

On Friday, a federal court in Texas temporarily blocked the Joe Biden administration’s requirement that federal employees be vaccinated against COVID-19 as a condition of employment. In the decision, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Vincent Brown in the Southern District of Texas ruled against the administration’s vaccine policy, which stems from executive orders issued by Biden […]

The Department of Energy’s Environmental Management Advisory Board will stick around for at least two more years, according to a Federal Register notice published last week. The advisory board is being renewed for a two-year period that began Jan. 14, according to the Jan. 21 notice, which said the action is taken under the Federal […]

Less than a week after moving to get ahead of allegations that its award of a multi-billion-dollar sites operations contract was tainted by conflicts of interest and impropriety, the National Nuclear Security Administration had made no sudden moves to restart the year-long competition to find the next manager of its two main nuclear-weapon manufacturing plants. […]

An audit of FirstEnergy Corp.’s additional charges to Ohio customers from 2017 to 2019 could not confirm that the money was used to improve the state’s power grid, as intended.  Nor could the audit prove that the money went to bribe the Ohio House’s former speaker and other state lawmakers, who rammed a controversial nuclear-related […]

Savannah River Remediation, the outgoing, Amentum-led liquid waste contractor at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina, took home about $43.8 million, or 98%, of a potential $44.6 million fee during fiscal 2021, according to a scorecard released by the agency this week. Savannah River Remediation (SRR), which includes Amentum, Bechtel, Jacobs […]

Fluor-led Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, the prime in charge of the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina, garnered an “excellent” scorecard from the feds and took home about $38.8 million, or 96%, of its potential fee for the last 10 months of fiscal 2021. Meanwhile, Battelle Savannah River Alliance, the new spinoff […]

Kathryn Huff is a step closer to removing ‘acting’ from her title as assistant secretary of the Department of Energy’s nuclear energy office, as the Joe Biden administration nominated her to take over the position full-time Wednesday. If confirmed by the Senate, Huff will take over the Office of Nuclear Energy’s (NE) head chair, which […]