Publications: ExchangeMonitor Morning Briefing

It can happen on submarines, it can happen in the mail and it can happen if you fly a lot: a dose big enough to keep you out of radiological areas for a while. At the Pantex Plant earlier this year, it happened because someone left their dosimeter near a linear accelerator. That’s according to […]

Next week, a committee of the Texas state House of Representatives will consider a bill that would ban storage of high-level nuclear waste, including spent fuel from power plants, in the Lone Star state. H.B. 2692, proposed earlier this month by state Rep. Brooks Landgraf (R), will hear debate in the state’s House Environmental Regulation […]

An environmental watchdog group that previously raised concerns about environmental law violations in the sale of Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station is now formally asking the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to pump the brakes on the transaction, according to new documents. In a motion dated Monday, Three Mile Island Alert (TMIA) argued that until the […]

The Department of Energy, Washington State and the Environmental Protection Agency are meeting more frequently these days to negotiate changes to legally binding Hanford cleanup deadlines that longstanding technical challenges — and later, COVID-19 — may have made untenable, a Washington state official said Wednesday. “I am optimistic on some progress we have made,” Bowen […]

The Department of Energy could formally reply to subcontractor complaints at the Hanford Site in Washington state “within the next few days or the next few weeks,” Brian Vance, the top manager at the facility said Wednesday. The DOE Office of Environmental Management executive made his comments during a virtual meeting of the Hanford Advisory […]

Virginia-based Bechtel announced in a press release this week that Stephen Bechtel Jr., who served three decades as CEO of the privately-held company that bears his family’s name, died Monday at age 95. In 1960 Stephen Bechtel Jr. became CEO of the company started by his grandfather in 1898, according to the Washington Post, and […]

New Mexico is one step closer to getting the inside baseball on proposed spent fuel repositories after a bill that would expand the mandate of a radioactive waste task force won approval in the state House’s environmental committee this week. Senate Bill (SB) 82, proposed by state Sen. Jeff Steinborn (D), passed the state House […]

The U.S. Senate Monday voted 51-to-40 to confirm Rep. Debra Haaland (D-N.M.) as secretary of interior, which will create a vacancy in the congressional district that includes the Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories facilities in Albuquerque. Haaland presented House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with her letter of resignation Tuesday and issued a farewell address to […]

As a legal battle continues over the decommissioning of Indian Point Nuclear Generating Station, the company in charge of dismantling the plant took to local media last week to plead their case. Decommissioning the Buchanan, N.Y. power plant could lead to a “rebirth and re-use” of the land it’s located on, bringing new jobs and […]

Bechtel National earned 70%, or $5.54 million out of a potential $7.88 million, for its work on the Waste Treatment Plant at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state in 2020. That is according to a fee scorecard released this week by the DOE’s Office of Environmental Management for the 2020 calendar year.  […]

Former National Nuclear Security Administration Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty joined the board of directors of Visible Assets, a closely held New Hampshire company that sells rugged, magnetic-based  asset-tracking and “internet of things” systems to military and high-tech clients.  Visible Assets announced the move in a press release on Tuesday. It’s the first publicly announced foray back […]

The United Kingdom officially announced Tuesday that it will raise the cap on its nuclear arsenal to 260 submarine-launched ballistic-missile warheads from the previous target of 180 warheads. “In 2010 the Government stated an intent to reduce our overall nuclear warhead stockpile ceiling from not more than 225 to not more than 180 by the […]

In a policy and organizing blitz on Monday, the co-owners of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station released a voluminous new report about the logistics of relocating the plant’s spent fuel and formed a new stakeholders group focused on the federal government. Action for Spent Fuel Solutions Now, spearheaded by Southern California Edison (SCE) and […]

Jim Bittner is taking over as vice president and general manager for BWX Technologies’ Nuclear Operations Groups’ Lynchburg, Va., manufacturing facility, which manufactures reactors for naval aircraft carriers and submarines, the company announced Monday. Bittner will be in charge of about 2,200 employees in Lynchburg, which is one of the two commercial facilities certified by […]

The Department of Energy plans a virtual pre-solicitation conference March 30 to share details on procurement for the new Waste Isolation Pilot Plant Transportation Services Contract. The DOE cleanup office plans to skip the draft-request-for-proposals stage and issue a final solicitation this spring, possibly in May. The DOE’s Office of Environmental Management will hold the […]

Contractor North Wind Portage has received final go-ahead to tear down the last few remaining contaminated buildings within the Department of Energy’s portion of the Santa Susana Field Laboratory in Ventura County, California. The California Department of Toxic Substances Control in a March 4 letter approved DOE plans for demolition of the remaining buildings at […]

A Pentagon official pulled out of a scheduled public briefing about plutonium pit production at the Savannah River Site on Monday because of a gag order imposed by a Biden Administration review, a group advising the South Carolina government on nuclear matters said. Drew Walter, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear matters, was […]

The head of the joint venture that manages the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site expects the rate of employee COVID-19 vaccinations to go from a trickle to a steady stream in the near future. “We have about 1,500 folks that have an appointment ready to go for their vaccinations,” within the next couple of […]

The conversion of depleted uranium hexafluoride at the Department of Energy’s Portsmouth Site in Ohio and Paducah Site in Kentucky came to a stop in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and had yet to restart as of last week, federal and contractor representatives said during an online conference. Neither Zachary Lafontaine, DOE’s program […]

The former chair of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission joined the University of Michigan as an adjunct professor, according to a press release. The university’s Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Science (NERS) department announced that Kristine Svinicki joined the faculty in a March 8 statement. Svinicki will help to “define the new directions for twenty-first-century nuclear engineering” […]

Here are some public events related to defense-nuclear matters that the ExchangeMonitor staff is tracking this week: 2021 March 17: The DOE Environmental Management Site-Specific Advisory Board for Nevada meets virtually at 4 p.m. Pacific Time. 17: Hanford Advisory Board kicks off a virtual two-day meeting at 9 a.m. Pacific Time. 18: The DOE Environmental […]

A Department of Labor board last week ruled against a Hanford contractor’s appeal of a 2016 decision favoring two whistleblowers at the former plutonium production site in Washington state. Labor’s Administrative Review Board on March 10 upheld federal Administrative Law Judge Christopher Larson’s 2016 ruling that Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC) experts Kirtley Clem and Matthew […]

Paul Kreitz, who has helped manage planning and construction of pit production infrastructure at the Los Alamos National Laboratory for the past two years or so, is leaving lab manager Triad National Security in late April, a lab official said this week. Kreitz was not one of Triad National Security’s key personnel. Before Los Alamos, […]

Christopher Hanson, the newly minted chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, has seen nuclear energy from just about every angle the federal government looks at it. By the time he was sworn in as an NRC commissioner in June 2020, Hanson had done a five-year stint as Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-Calif.) energy and water staffer […]

A Nuclear Regulatory Commission study recommending updates for disposal of very low-level radioactive waste is scheduled to wrap up this spring, a Nuclear Regulatory Commission staffer said this week. The commission’s very low-level waste (VLLW) scoping study is supposed to finish up in April, Stephen Koenick, NRC low-level waste project chief, said Wednesday in a […]

The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant could go offline for a major ventilation upgrade right around the time the Los Alamos National Laboratory starts casting new nuclear weapon cores and generating a slew of new defense transuranic waste, a lab official said Wednesday at the online Waste Management Symposia conference. “As we progress in our nuclear […]