Publications: ExchangeMonitor Morning Briefing

A Nevada Democrat sponsoring a bill that would ban funding for a federal nuclear waste repository without stakeholder consent said Monday the Joe Biden administration and the Department of Energy are in the Silver State’s corner. “With President Biden and Secretary Granholm, I believe we have partners who will help advance these ideas and move […]

The U.S. Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program has awarded Lynchburg, Va.,-based BWX Technologies contracts worth about $2.2 billion for making naval reactor parts and fuel, the company said in a Tuesday morning press release. BWXT Nuclear Operations Group sites in Virginia, Ohio and Indiana will manufacture nuclear reactor components for Columbia and Virginia-class submarines over an […]

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s staff “intentionally mischaracterized” a nuclear watchdog group’s request to hold up the sale of Three Mile Island Generating Station Unit 2 when it recommended the agency toss the petition on procedural grounds, according to a new filing. Three Mile Island (TMI) Alert’s March 15 request to pause the plant’s Unit 2 […]

A National Academies panel said Monday that monitoring, detection and verification of nuclear weapons and fissile material should be a higher national security priority and that more government coordination is needed on the issue. That is the crux of an interim report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, published Monday. The report, […]

The Department of Energy said Monday the solicitation for a new five-year, $100-million transportation contract for its Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico should be released in the next 25-to-60 days. As a result, the final request for proposals (RFP) for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) Transportation Services Procurement should be out by […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration and the prime contractor for the Y-12 Nuclear Security Complex at Oak Ridge, Tenn., are working with the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management to shrink the high-security protected area around Y-12 by almost  half. Ground was broken April 7 on the $160-million West End Protected Area Reduction project, […]

The Department of Energy’s decision to issue a sole-source contract for construction of a nuclear cleanup research center in South Carolina to an affiliate of North Wind Group is justified in part because it helps the agency meet its annual obligation to small businesses, according to a recent procurement notice. The contract for construction of […]

A nuclear watchdog group that opposes the sale of Three Mile Island Generating Station will file further arguments against the transaction today, the group’s president said. Three Mile Island Alert will file its response today to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff’s recommendation that the agency toss the watchdog group’s request to hold the sale of […]

Here are some public events related to defense- and civilian-nuclear matters that the Exchange Monitor staff is tracking this week: April 19: The National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine holds a virtual seminar on its new Nuclear Proliferation and Arms Control report at 2 p.m. Eastern time. 20: The Nuclear Threat Initiative holds a […]

Barring extensions, the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management has four contracts set to expire within the next 60 days, according to the contract summary page for the $7-billion-plus nuclear cleanup branch. Portsmouth Mission Alliance, a partnership between North Wind Group and Swift & Staley, has the roughly five-year, $190-million infrastructure service contract at […]

The United Kingdom will plow ahead with its new submarine-launched warhead no matter what happens this year with the planned W93 in the U.S., and the warhead replacement program has nothing to do with the Kingdom’s recent decision to increase its warhead cap, an official with the Ministry of Defence said this week. The U.K. […]

President Joe Biden will nominate Jill Hruby, former director of the Sandia National Laboratories, to lead the National Nuclear Security Administration, the White House said Wednesday. Hruby led Sandia for about two years during the Barack Obama administration, from mid-2015 to mid-2017. Since then, she has worked as an independent consultant, logging time on federal […]

The president of a nuclear watchdog group said Wednesday that his organization’s recent motion to hold the sale of Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station was “appropriate” after Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff recommended that the agency scrap the request. Eric Epstein, president of Three Mile Island Alert, said that the group’s March 15 motion to […]

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality on Wednesday published a minor amendment to Waste Control Specialists’s state radioactive material license, allowing the company to keep potentially combustible drums of Department of Energy transuranic waste at a commercial site in Andrews County until Dec. 23, 2022. The amendment proposed Dec. 9 by Waste Control Specialists (WCS) […]

Leidos-led Mission Support Alliance, the former landlord services contractor at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state, settled a fraud lawsuit, reportedly for $6-million, in a case brought two years ago by the Department of Justice. “I can confirm that this case has been settled,” Bob Miller, a spokesman for the Leidos-Centerra joint […]

There are “significant opportunities” for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to apply industry recommendations to its current approach to the safe dry storage of spent nuclear fuel, a trade group representative said at an agency workshop Tuesday. “It’s our intent to use and consider risk principles in assessing safety margins for dry storage, for the uniform […]

The Department of Energy’s nuclear cleanup office first rolled out its end state contracting model in 2018 and now wants to clearly define exactly how that model is supposed to work. The DOE Office of Environmental Management (EM) tucked this nugget inside its Strategic Vision for 2021-2031. “In 2021, EM will implement a new End-State […]

The chair of the House Armed Services Committee quoted chapter-and-verse from his bible of nuclear weapon policies in a Tuesday chat with the D.C.-based Reagan Institute, during which he advocated for trimming the defense budget by preventing particular crises rather than gearing up to win an all-out war. “I think that we can have a […]

Managers at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state have confirmed six more positive cases of COVID-19 since Saturday. The latest five were reported Tuesday in a note posted to a DOE website run by a Leidos-led Hanford support contractor. New cases at the former plutonium production complex have run in the low- […]

Within 10 years, the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management hopes to have its vitrification plant humming at the Hanford Site in Washington state, with 40% of the tanks closed at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and also be about done with legacy cleanup at the Moab Site in Utah as well […]

In its final scorecard, CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation earned 78% of the fee available to it for about four months of work at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state. Altogether, the Jacobs subsidiary pocketed $6.36 million out of an available $8.16 million for the period from Oct. 1, 2020 through Jan. 24, […]

The next contractor in charge of moving defense-related transuranic to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., under a planned five-year contract may handle 500-to-800 shipments annually, the Department Energy said in comments posted online recently. “Over the last 10 years, WIPP carrier miles have varied greatly from roughly 300,000 miles to more than […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration appointed Jason Armstrong to lead the Savannah River Field Office, the semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear-weapon steward wrote in a press release on Monday. Armstrong was most recently assistant manager for nuclear safety and engineering at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Production Office in Tennessee, where he had worked […]

A nuclear watchdog group’s request to delay the sale of Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating station is “procedurally improper and without merit,” and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission should toss the group’s objection, agency staff wrote in a Monday brief. The group, Three Mile Island Alert, alleged that the FirstEnergy companies and an EnergySolutions subsidiary ran […]

The Department of Energy expects to issue the final solicitation for a new prime contract for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico between now and June, according to a Monday procurement notice. The agency said the final request for proposals (RFP) for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) should be out between 30 […]