Publications: ExchangeMonitor Morning Briefing

The nearly $7.6-billion fiscal 2022 budget request the Joe Biden administration made Friday for the Department of Energy Office of Environmental Management is larger than White House requests for nuclear cleanup made during the Donald Trump administration and, if enacted by Congress, would continue a run of beefy appropriations. In February 2020, the Trump White […]

Although details are sparse, funding to site a federal interim storage facility for the nation’s spent nuclear fuel would be included in the Department of Energy’s budget proposal for 2022 if it became law, according to the agency’s latest top-level budget summary. The Office of Nuclear Energy’s (ONE) fuel cycle program should receive funding “for […]

Weapons Complex Morning Briefing will not publish today in observance of the Memorial Day holiday. Look for the next issue in your inbox on Tuesday.

A story in Wednesday’s Weapons Complex Morning Briefing (“SRS Finished Tritium Upgrades for B61-12 in February,” 05/26/2021) should have said that the NNSA plans to replace the tritium facilities at Savannah River Site’s H-Area Old Manufacturing Facility with a new Tritium Finishing Facility that is supposed to be operational around 2030.

A group of plaintiffs who last year sued current and former Department of Energy contractors at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio have asked a federal court for a four-month delay in the case while they replace two Florida attorneys, one of which is apparently facing disbarment proceedings back home. The plaintiffs, including former Portsmouth security […]

An Oregon designer of small modular reactors has linked up with a venture to build four small reactors at the Department of Energy’s Hanford site in Washington. The same design company also  lined up an undisclosed amount of incoming cash and a pipeline for parts from a Japanese company.  Both transactions were announced Wednesday.  NuScale […]

It could be late fall before New Mexico Environment Secretary James Kenney makes a ruling on whether the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant can complete development of a new underground shaft. That is based on timelines allotted by the New Mexico Environment Department, a state agency spokesperson said in a Monday email. Up […]

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission granted four nuclear power plants exemptions to federal regulations governing employee work hours and training during the month of April, according to a notice published by the agency Tuesday. Between April 6 and April 29 NRC granted work-hour control exemptions to: Fermi Nuclear Generating Station in Michigan; Clinton Power Station in […]

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission will make a final decision about whether to license one of two proposed interim storage sites for spent nuclear fuel “shortly after” it completes environmental impact statements for the project this summer, the agency’s spent fuel licensing project manager said Tuesday.  NRC is “currently close to completing the final safety evaluation […]

After a lawsuit by gold companies forced it to back off its initial selection of a commercial site in Texas for long-term storage of elemental mercury, the Department of Energy is again shopping around for a contractor and Waste Control Specialists is again one of the finalists. That is a key takeaway from DOE’s notice […]

Without much Republican support, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday favorably reported the Joe Biden administration’s nominee for the State Department’s top arms control post to the Senate floor. The vote in the evenly divided committee was 12-10 on Bonnie Jenkins’ nomination for under secretary of state for arms control and international security. The […]

The Savannah River Site in February completed upgrades to tritium processing facilities at the site’s H-Area that will allow personnel to fill tritium reservoirs for the planned B61-12 nuclear gravity bomb life-extension program, the site said Tuesday. The upgrades doubled the capacity of one of the site’s tritium lines capacity, according to a press release, […]

The Department of Energy and contractor Fluor Idaho said in a Tuesday press release the final shipment of radioactive waste has been placed into the 97-acre Subsurface Disposal Area at the Idaho National Laboratory. The disposal area, which began accepting waste in the 1950s and has since accepted laboratory-generated waste and shipments from the Rocky […]

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission says it still needs more information from Holtec International to complete a required safety evaluation of the company’s proposed interim storage facility in New Mexico — a precursor for licensing the facility to accept spent nuclear fuel. The agency’s Request for Additional Information (RAI) regarding the safety evaluation report for the […]

A regional group to promote communities around the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico has reportedly decided to close up shop. The Santa Fe New Mexican reported Monday the Regional Coalition  of LANL [Los Alamos National Laboratory] Communities voted during its Friday online meeting to start wrapping up operations. The move […]

National Engineering and Technology Solutions of Sandia, the Honeywell-owned prime for the Sandia National Laboratories, agreed to a $152,000 settlement with the Department of Energy over the unauthorized disclosure of classified information at the lab some time around 2019. The fine was not the only penalty Sandia paid, but other details of the enforcement were […]

Los Alamos National Laboratory has hired enough criticality safety personnel to support planned manufacturing of nuclear-weapon cores at the New Mexico laboratory, but staff churn among these crucial workers is more common than the lab believes, a new DOE review said. Lab management and operations contractor Triad National Security “has adequately managed the training and […]

Members of the public only have a few days to get in their comments on a proposed license amendment enabling cleanup operations at the Church Rock uranium mine, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The last day for comments on the agency’s draft environmental impact statement for the action is Thursday, NRC has said. The […]

The legacy cleanup contractor for the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico now has a public website about its efforts to remediate contamination along a public road in Los Alamos County. Radioactive contamination was discovered in February 2020 within a 28-acre parcel of land along DP Road that DOE had already […]

Once again, the Congressional Budget Office’s biennial cost estimate for the 10 years of nuclear modernization spending has arrived just in time for the yearly federal budget debate on Capitol Hill. The latest congressionally mandated report from the non-partisan office covers planned spending from 2021 through 2030, during which Pentagon and Department of Energy programs […]

The top fed at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state has reversed course and will keep the mask mandate in place for now regardless of whether workers are fully vaccinated against COVID-19. After initially saying last week fully-inoculated employees could stop wearing face coverings as soon as Tuesday, Hanford’s site manager Brian […]

The former Sandia National Laboratories director nominated by President Joe Biden to lead the National Nuclear Security Administration was scheduled for a confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday. Jill Hruby was slated to appear alongside three other Biden administration nominees, including Frank Rose, the man nominated to be her deputy at […]

The company in charge of decommissioning Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station in New Jersey finished moving the plant’s spent fuel inventory into dry storage last week, according to a press release. Oyster Creek’s decommissioning is “on track for becoming the most expedited decommissioning program in the nation’s history,” Holtec International said in a press release […]

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management plans to relocate some transuranic waste from the Nevada National Security Site to the Idaho National Laboratory where it will be prepared for eventual shipment to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. The transuranic material is what “we refer to as the Nevada spheres,” Robert […]

Here are some public events related to defense- and civilian-nuclear matters that the Exchange Monitor staff is tracking this week: May 27 – Confirmation hearing: Senate Armed Services Committee. Nominations — Hruby, Rose, Rosenblum, Maier. Includes Jill Hruby, nominees for administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, and Frank Rose, nominee for principal deputy administrator […]

A wildfire at the Nevada National Security Site moved into an area containing radiological contamination from a Cold War-era test over the weekend and continued to burn as of deadline Monday, according to the former test site. “Estimates provided by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Atmospheric Release Advisory Center indicate potential radiological exposures for onsite […]