Publications: ExchangeMonitor Morning Briefing

Nearly all staff members at the nation’s top nuclear power regulator have been vaccinated against COVID-19, a spokesperson said Wednesday. 2,684 of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s 2,836 employees, around 95%, are fully vaxxed as of Wednesday, an agency spokesperson told Exchange Monitor via email. NRC doesn’t track booster shots and isn’t required to, the spokesperson […]

The story “Top EM Official Expects Hanford Tank-Side Cesium Removal Startup in January” [Weapons Complex Morning Briefing, Dec. 14, 2021] should have said the Tank-Side Cesium Removal project was built by subcontractor AVANtech and installed by contractor Washington River Protection Solutions.

A minerals company is fighting to stay involved with Texas’ lawsuit against a proposed interim storage facility for spent nuclear fuel and wants the suit to stay in the Fifth Circuit, court papers filed this week show. Texas-based Fasken Land and Minerals, a longtime opponent of Interim Storage Partners’ proposed site in Andrews, Texas, argued […]

The Department of Energy’s nuclear cleanup office could find out soon if the administration of President Joe Biden will back a second trial run moving certain high-level radioactive waste out of the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and disposing of it in a facility licensed for low-level waste. That was the word Monday from […]

A publicly-traded special purpose acquisition corporation is merging with NuScale Power, a developer of small modular reactors, in a move expected to turn NuScale, Portland, Ore., into a public company sometime in the first half of 2022. The acquirer is an Oregon-based subsidiary of Spring Valley Acquisition Corp., a special entity set up in the Cayman […]

The state of Illinois wants Washington to step up and save its economically-troubled nuclear power plants after the Prairie State’s multi-million dollar bailout bill expires, a state senator said Tuesday. “[O]ur hope is that this issue will be taken on at the federal level and that it will have an answer at the federal level,” […]

More than 90% of the federal employees and contract workers at the Department of Energy’s nuclear cleanup branch have now been vaccinated against COVID-19, with more than 2,000 apparently still not taking the shot. “The vast majority of our [Environmental Management] EM workforce is vaccinated,” a spokesperson for the DOE Office of Environmental Management said […]

Groups led by BWX Technologies and Bechtel National have protested the National Nuclear Security Administration’s decision to award management and operations of the agency’s two main nuclear-weapons production sites to the Fluor-led Nuclear Production One.  The Government Accountability Office filed notices online Monday that Strategic Nuclear Operators — which web searches show shares an address […]

A private company’s plans to purchase and decommission two Michigan nuclear power plants took a step forward Monday, when the Nuclear Regulatory Commission provisionally approved the transaction, according to a new agency order. NRC staff approved the sale of Palisades Nuclear Generating Station and Big Rock Point Nuclear Power Plant to Holtec International from Entergy, […]

A former in-house federal inspector at a Virginia nuclear plant is facing up to five years of prison time after he was found guilty of intentionally falsifying inspection reports, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s inspector general announced Monday. Gregory Croon, NRC’s former resident inspector for the North Anna Power Station in Mineral, Va., pleaded guilty in […]

The Department of Energy’s cleanup branch announced Monday that Joel Bradburne is the new field office manager at the Portsmouth-Paducah Project Office, after acting as the top boss for operations in Ohio and Kentucky since Robert Edwards retired at the end of July. “In this role he will oversee the deactivation and demolition of the […]

The top fed at the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management expects the Tank-Side Cesium Removal project at the Hanford Site in Washington state to begin operating “within weeks.” Office of Environmental Management (EM) senior adviser William (Ike) White made the comment Monday during an online meeting of the chairs of the chairs of […]

An Aug. 8 experiment at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility that dazzled scientists, weapons-focused and otherwise, has the National Nuclear Security Administration rethinking plans to focus the facility more strictly on nuclear-weapons work. The experiment did not create a sustained nuclear fusion reaction, but it did set a new record for energy […]

Citing COVID-19-related supply chain disruptions on the agency’s end, the Department of Energy has cancelled plans for Centrus Energy Corp., Bethesda, Md., to operate a new uranium enrichment centrifuge at the Portsmouth Site in Piketon, Ohio, next year, the company disclosed Friday. Under a DOE contract awarded in 2019, Centrus subsidiary American Centrifuge Operating was […]

Here are some events related to defense and civilian matters that the Exchange Monitor staff is tracking this week: 13 – Environmental Management Advisory Board: Virtual meeting via Zoom. 1 p.m. Eastern Time. Anyone wishing to attend should register by 5 p.m. Dec. 6 by emailing Alyssa.Harris@em.doe.gov.  15-16 – The Hanford Advisory Board:  online Meeting starting at […]

There was “no impact” to Department of Environmental Management sites in Kentucky and Tennessee after a rash of unusual late-autumn tornados wrought death and destruction across the middle of the country over the weekend. “Thankfully, no impact to our EM sites,” a spokesperson for the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) wrote Monday […]

With a federal COVID-19 vaccine mandate suspended at the site, employees put on unpaid leave because they would not take the vaccine were scheduled to return to work Monday at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a lab spokesperson told the Exchange Monitor. “To comply with the federal court order and the state’s suspension of its […]

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Monday should give decommissioning company Holtec International the go-ahead to buy two Michigan nuclear power plants, according to a recent notice from the agency. In a Dec. 3 letter to the commissioners, the agency said NRC staff should issue an order Monday approving the sale of Palisades Nuclear Generating Station […]

Ignoring the ex-Sandia National Laboratories employee’s plea for probation, a federal judge in New Mexico sentenced Joshua Cordova to nearly two years in prison for the four counts of fraud to which he admitted earlier this year. Cordova worked at the Albuquerque-based labs network from 2011 to 2019, instructing military and law enforcement personnel how […]

ALEXANDRIA, VA.—During a Thursday address to the National Cleanup Workshop here, Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.) touched upon everything from Congress averting a government shutdown to the need for a new disposal site for nuclear debris at the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee. “We are either going to pass a budget or get a year-long CR […]

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear an environmental watchdogs’ bid to stop the storage of spent nuclear fuel at a California nuclear power plant under decommissioning. The highest court in the land, an independent branch of the federal government, denied San Diego-based Public Watchdogs’ petition for review of a Ninth Circuit Court […]

ALEXIANDRIA, VA — The Department of Energy expects a new ventilation system at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico to come online between 2024 and 2026, the manager of the agency’s Carlsbad field office said here Wednesday. The agency’s Office of Environmental Management expects its rebaselining of the cost and schedule for the […]

ALEXANDRIA, VA. — The demolition of the massive X-326 Process Building, which began in the spring, is underway and should be finished in summer 2022, an executive with the decommissioning contractor at the Department of Energy’s Portsmouth Site in Ohio said at a conference here Wednesday. “We are off to a very good start of […]

A federal judge in Georgia blocked the Joe Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for contractors on Tuesday, almost exactly three months after Biden issued an executive order requiring shots for workers doing the government’s business. Most prime contractors at Department of Energy defense-nuclear sites had had their contracts modified to include a vaccine mandate well […]

The state of New Mexico will need to file its first supporting arguments early next year in its legal challenge to a recently-licensed interim storage facility for spent nuclear fuel in Texas, according to new court filings. State attorney general Hector Balderas has until Jan. 18 to file the next brief in his lawsuit against […]