Publications: ExchangeMonitor Morning Briefing

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission asked a federal court to throw out industry’s request for judicial review of the commission’s claim that the federal government is the ultimate decision-maker about low-level waste disposal. In a brief filed Friday with the D.C. Circuit Court, the commission both refuted the Nuclear Energy Institute’s (NEI) legal basis for review […]

A pair of think-tanks are pushing a combination of machine learning and open-source data as a way to generate more leads on potential nuclear proliferation and said Tuesday that a recent pilot project shows the technique “could save hundreds of analyst hours” if put into practice by the government. That was the claim in a […]

This week the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico plans a short-duration test of its idle 700-C ventilation fan to increase underground airflow during certain work. The testing will last about four hours, according to a press release issued late Friday by the DOE’s prime contractor for the Waste Isolation Plant […]

Nuclear plant closures will represent the majority of generating capacity retirements in 2021, the Energy Information Administration forecast Tuesday. The loss of nuclear generating capacity — a total of 5.1 gigawatts — amounts to 56% of the expected capacity loss for the coming year, the Department of Energy organization said. Exelon’s Dresden and Byron nuclear […]

Ho Nieh, director of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Reactor Regulation program, plans to retire Jan. 30, he said Friday. Nieh announced his decision in a letter to Commission staff. He is leaving for “personal reasons,” NRC spokesman David Castelveter, wrote in an email on Friday. As director of the Reactor Regulation program, Nieh oversaw reactor […]

William Bookless will resign as acting administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration on inauguration day, Jan. 20, setting up career civil servant David Huizenga to shepherd the nuclear-weapons agency through the early days of the Joe Biden administration. Bookless announced his impending departure Monday in an all-hands memo to National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) […]

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management still has much work to do on its end state contracting model in order to truly drive nuclear cleanup projects toward completion, according to a National Academy of Sciences report released Monday. The Environmental Management (EM) office should set up results on intermediate end state milestones midway […]

Jamie Shimek will remain clerk of the House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee, providing a modicum of stability for Washington nuke watchers scrambling to update their contacts list ahead of the transition to the Joe Biden administration. Shimek joined the committee that writes each year’s first draft of the Department of Energy annual budget bill […]

With the Donald Trump administration coming to an end in a little over a week, longtime cleanup hand Todd Shrader is expected to take over as acting head of the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management office until President-electric Joe Biden has his own people in place. An industry source on Monday said to […]

The Huntington Ingalls Industries-led contractor in charge of legacy cleanup at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico won roughly 82% of its total potential fee and 72% of its subjective fee in a recently-released scorecard from the Department of Energy.  Newport News Nuclear BWXT (N3B) Los Alamos took home $8.4 million out of […]

Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.), whose district includes the Oak Ridge Site, has tested positive for COVID-19. Meanwhile, there are a batch of new cases at the Department of Energy headquarters in Washington, D.C. Fleischmann announced in a Sunday press release that he has tested positive for the coronavirus. “Today, I learned that I have tested […]

Office of Nuclear Energy Chief Baranwal Leaves DOE Ahead of Inauguration Rita Baranwal, who made headlines in her Department of Energy tenure as a voice for the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel, resigned Friday as President Donald Trump’s assistant secretary for nuclear energy. Baranwal announced the decision on the official twitter account for DOE’s Office […]

Lynchburg, Va.-based BWX Technologies this morning appointed Rob Smith as its president of government operations, which is a newly-created post. In that role, Smith will lead the company’s nuclear operations and nuclear services segments. This includes work for the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the Naval Nuclear […]

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality is reviewing a request by Waste Control Specialists to continue holding drums of potentially-combustible transuranic waste from the Los Alamos National Laboratory at its Andrews County, Texas facility into December 2022. About 110 containers of the problem waste from the Los Alamos Lab in New Mexico have basically been […]

Mark Fallon took over as chief executive officer of Aptim Corp. during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, about four years after departing CH2M: now a Jacobs subsidiary that still looms large in the nuclear-cleanup market. Boxed in by a year of telework, like many of his peers, Fallon is eager for the energy […]

The Department of Energy and Bechtel announced Wednesday in an online ceremony that construction of facilities needed to start processing low-activity tank waste are complete at the $17-billion vitrification plant at the Hanford Site in Washington state. The direct-feed low-activity waste (DFLAW) facilities at the Waste Treatment Plant include a new Analytical Laboratory, the new […]

A federal judge declined to give the former prime contractor of the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility any relief from federal fraud claims, even though the company argued it had already paid back some of the money the government sued to recover, according to a recent filing in the U.S. District Court for South Carolina. […]

Time appears to have run out on the nomination of Matthew Moury to be a member of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board. As of Jan. 3, the nomination to the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) was officially returned by the Senate to President Donald Trump after the nomination never advanced to the full […]

The U.S. Civilian Board of Contract Appeals has ruled the Department of Energy was wrong to disallow $16.6 million in costs incurred over several years by parent companies of Mission Support Alliance. In a ruling dated Dec. 17, the appeals board held the agreement between DOE and the Leidos-led infrastructure services contractor team at the […]

The commander of U.S. nuclear forces, who met with President-elect Joe Biden’s (D) transition team recently, worried Monday that the civilian nuclear weapons complex faces problems bigger than a potential slip in plutonium-pit production. Under the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act passed into law this month over President Donald Trump’s veto, U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) […]

The Low Activity Waste Facility at the Hanford Site in Washington State is now scheduled to begin solidifying liquid waste not sooner than 2024, instead of 2023, because of COVID-19, under a recent agreement between the Department of Energy and Washington state. In December, Judge Rosanna Peterson of the Eastern District of Washington approved a […]

The Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Nevada National Security Site are resetting the underground U1a facility at the former Nevada Test Site for the second in three planned Nightshade subcritical experiments. Nightshade B is scheduled to fire in “spring 2021,” a spokesperson for the Los Alamos National Laboratory told Weapons Complex Morning Briefing in […]

On Monday, 14 workers at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state informed management they have tested positive for COVID-19. That is according to a bulletin posted on a DOE Hanford operations website run by the Leidos-led Mission Support Alliance. The latest batch of positive tests brings the total number of COVID-19 cases […]

Lowering the hazard classification of some defense-nuclear waste could save the Department of Energy more than $200 billion in disposal costs, the agency told Congress in a report three years in the making. Most of the potential savings, between roughly $70 billion and $200 billion, would come from reclassifying low-activity waste at the Hanford West […]

The Sandia National Laboratories split its Nuclear Deterrence division into two new organizations and brought in a former Raytheon executive to oversee them, the Albuquerque, N.M.-based labs network announced this week. Sandia rolled out the changes internally in November, a labs spokesperson wrote in an email to Weapons Complex Morning Briefing. A major cog in […]

Kristine Svinicki will retire from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Jan. 21, more than a year before her five-year term is up, after serving under three presidents and leading the nuclear-power-plant regulator as chair since 2017. Svinicki, first nominated to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2007 by then-President George W. Bush, has been commissioner since […]