Publications: ExchangeMonitor Morning Briefing

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued a blanket denial recently of four hearing requests and three motions filed respectively by the state of New York and environmental watchdog groups that sought to delay the sale of Indian Point Energy Center, according to a recent agency memorandum. According to the memo dated Friday, the state of New […]

The Department of Energy will not pursue a civil penalty against Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth over nuclear safety violations in fiscal year 2019 after it cut $2.6 million from the company’s potential $6.7-million subjective fee that year. The infractions at the former gaseous diffusion plant complex in Ohio stem from shortcomings in worker radiation protection at the […]

A Democratic House staffer who has worked the nuclear weapons and strategic systems portfolio for the House Armed Services Committee for a decade will get a Pentagon post with a similar bailiwick in the Joe Biden administration. Leonor Tomero will be deputy assistant director for nuclear and missile defense programs after inauguration day, the publication […]

For now at least, the compensation for top managers under the next Oak Ridge Reservation Cleanup Contract in Tennessee will be capped at $525,000 annually, the Department of Energy said in a procurement document posted Jan. 15. The DOE issued its final request for proposals for a new Oak Ridge remediation contract last month and […]

Remaining cleanup costs at the West Valley Demonstration Project site in New York could run anywhere from $1.4 billion to $10.6 billion depending on how much contamination is dug up and shipped off-site, the Government Accountability Office said in its report last week on waste disposal at the site. As of February 2020, the Department […]

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission denied a nuclear watchdog’s request for a hearing regarding the sale of Three Mile Island Nuclear Plant’s Unit 2 reactor, according to a memorandum published by the agency Friday. The watchdog, Three Mile Island Alert, Inc., wanted the NRC to take a closer look at the transfer of the Three Mile […]

Management at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state has confirmed nine new cases of COVID-19 since Friday. Bosses at the former plutonium production facility were informed of the latest batch of positive cases, seven, on Monday, according to an advisory posted on a DOE website run by the site services contractor. The […]

Nuclear services company Orano projects it will double its output of dry-storage canisters, relative to 2020, after consolidating its heavy manufacturing in the United States, the company said in a statement.  In 2020, Orano fulfilled all of its customer contracts for its NUTECH horizontal modular storage system (NUHOMS) dry-storage canisters while operating at two-thirds manufacturing […]

Adding another hash mark to the record of winter disruptions on the hill, the Los Alamos National Laboratory opened late today, advising essential personnel needed for national security work inside the fence to wait out some heavy snow before reporting in. That means the roughly 20% of Los Alamos’ workforce still on site amid ongoing […]

The Ohio Attorney General’s office is seeking an injunction against FirstEnergy Corp. and Energy Harbor from being guaranteed an income of $102 million annually — a guarantee stashed away in the fine print of the scandal-plagued nuclear bailout legislation, Ohio House Bill 6.  Signed into law in 2020, House Bill 6 provides a $150 million […]

Weapons Complex Morning Briefing will not be published today, Jan. 18, 2021, in observance of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. Look for the next issue in your inbox on Tuesday, Jan. 19, 2021.

For the second time in two years, the Department of Energy is looking at shipping certain radioactive waste, now classified as high-level, from the Savannah River Site in South Carolina to a commercial disposal site out of state. The DOE said in a Wednesday press release it will issue a Federal Register notice within days […]

Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall is officially headed to the National Security Council, ending for now any prospects of a return to the Department of Energy, where the nonproliferation and weapons-of-mass-destruction policy hand was second-in-command during the Obama administration. The Biden transition team officially announced the move Wednesday, which media had reported earlier. Sherwood-Randall will be homeland security […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration has scheduled another virtual job fair, with the next in the series scheduled for Jan. 27, the semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear weapons agency announced.  The agency said it has “more than 2,000 NNSA federal and contractor positions” to fill, “including engineers, policy experts, and physical scientists, throughout the country.” […]

Federal staffer Allison Finelli has been officially appointed as deputy chief of staff at the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management since acting in that capacity since March. The promotion was announced in a Tuesday email to staff at the nuclear cleanup branch by William (Ike) White, the senior advisor for the Environmental Management […]

The incoming Biden administration should designate a senior official reporting to the White House to negotiate both long-term and interim radioactive waste storage with Congress, said David Klaus in an op-ed published Tuesday by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. “A senior negotiator representing the administration would provide focus, leadership, and momentum for legislative action […]

The Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., took in 10 shipments of transuranic waste during December and 192 for all of 2020. The 2020 figure is a major drop-off, 100 fewer than the total of 292 for 2019, according to data from DOE’s public website for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant […]

An article in the Jan. 13 Weapons Complex Morning Briefing incorrectly reported that a Maryland-based company Appsential has filed a bid protest of an Office of Environmental Management (EM) waste treatment contract. The company protested an unrelated Department of Energy contract outside of EM. 

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) […]