Publications: ExchangeMonitor Morning Briefing

Amentum-led Central Plateau Cleanup Co. kicks off its 60-day transition period today to become the new major remediation contractor at the Central Plateau area of Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state, under a potential 10-year, $10-billion agreement. On Dec. 4 the joint venture comprising Amentum, Fluor and Atkins will take over from Jacobs […]

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has released its record of decision for cleaning up contaminated soil on its portion of the Santa Susana Field Laboratory in Ventura County, Calif. Like Boeing, and the Department of Energy, NASA is one of three parties responsible for cleanup of the sprawling research site in the Simi Valley. […]

A COVID-19 outbreak hit the Salt Waste Processing Facility roughly a month before its scheduled opening at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina, but the outbreak is under control now, the facility’s prime contractor said Wednesday. More than 40 members of the operations or maintenance staff for Parsons were unavailable during […]

The group of cities that originally signed on to buy the energy produced by NuScales Power small reactors has agreed to extend the deadline to drop out of the project by another month.  The original deadline to withdraw from Nuscales’ Carbon Free Power Project was Sept. 30. By now, two of the 35 cities that […]

Not that it ever stopped, but the National Nuclear Security Administration on Wednesday officially reaffirmed its decision to continue building the Uranium Processing Facility at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn. The long-expected news, delivered in an amended record of decision filed in the Federal Register, was pressaged in June, when the […]

“We do pretty high-hazard work in the complex, and we found it very interesting that folks who would climb into a reactor vessel or be moving fuel, or out in the DOE complex would be opening canisters to do repackaging — which is at some level pretty risky — were extremely nervous and extremely concerned […]

With Tuesday’s award from the Department of Energy, four major new contractors have been announced for the Hanford Site in Washington state since last December. Two of the four joint ventures have already received a green light to start transition from DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, one contract award appears in doubt, and the latest […]

Fluor Idaho, the cleanup contractor for the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory, will serve as mentor to an engineering services firm in Idaho Falls. The remediation contractor announced in a Tuesday press release that it signed a mentor-protégé agreement with Walsh Engineering Services. The owner and president of Walsh Engineering Services, Mark Pope, said […]

OSI Systems acquired the radiation detection company Nucsafe in a deal that expands its products and customer footprint in the nuclear security market. Terms of the transaction, which was conducted by OSI’s subsidiary American Science & Engineering, were not disclosed late Tuesday. Nucsafe’s management and development team will remain with the company. OSI highlighted Nucsafe’s […]

Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Democrat New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham may come from ideologically opposite sides of the spectrum, but now they have at least one gripe in common: neither is interested in hosting a nuclear waste storage facility in their state.  Abbott wrote a letter to President Donald Trump on Wednesday […]

Federal agencies were still open for business Thursday morning, after President Trump signed a stopgap budget bill that freezes most federal budgets at 2020 levels through Dec. 11. With appropriations set to lapse at midnight, the Senate on Wednesday cast votes to pass the measure with less than a working day left before the literal […]

A New York congresswoman announced a $3 million relief package for the site of the soon-to-be-decommissioned Indian Point Energy Center in New York to help revitalize the local economy on Wednesday. Rep. Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) plans to use the funding to create a new educational recreation facility on the Hudson River, roads and a water […]

A Department of Energy advisory board is drafting a report to help the Office of Environmental Management develop a complex-wide priorities list for nuclear cleanup complex. The DOE Environmental Management Advisory Board could vote later this fall on a subcommittee report into how to make remediation of 16 Cold War and Manhattan Project sites more […]

Advocacy groups are pushing Ohio’s public utilities commission to pursue a broader investigation of FirstEnergy and affiliates’ alleged lobbying activities associated with nuclear power plant bailouts under Larry Householder, the former Ohio House speaker.  The utility company has until the end of the day Wednesday to show cause demonstrating that the costs of any political […]

The Department of Energy Tuesday awarded a joint venture led by Oak Ridge, Tenn.-based Navarro Research and Engineering a $389-million contract to run the 222-S Laboratory at the Hanford Site in Washington state. Hanford Laboratory Management and Integration is a team of Navarro, and Advanced Technologies and Laboratories International, wholly owned subsidiary of Planned Systems […]

The competitive landscape for the potentially 10-year, $28-billion contract to manage the National Nuclear Security Administration’s two big nuclear weapons production sites is starting to come into focus, now that the agency has hosted hopefuls for site visits and one-on-one meetings. Following tours of the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., and the […]

The Senate late Tuesday cleared the first procedural hurdle to prevent an election year government shutdown, voting to end debate on a continuing resolution that would freeze Department of Energy defense-nuclear budgets at 2020 levels through Dec. 11. The roughly quarter-long continuing resolution passed 82 to 6. The measure would provide billions of dollars less […]

Thirty years after the end of the Cold War, it’d be a surprise if anybody engaged in, or cleaning up after, nuclear-weapons production at Department of Energy sites across the country went to bed this week disappointed that atomic energy defense activities didn’t rate a few minutes on the presidential debate stage.  We might say […]

The former chair of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board used procedural tactics to block board approval of a COVID-19 response plan that complied with federal best practices, the inspector general of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said. The independent federal nuclear health-and-safety watchdog drafted a COVID-19 response plan at the onset of the pandemic, but […]

In the 2019 fiscal year, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) almost met its security strategic goal — but not quite.  According to a powerpoint published on the commission’s website ahead of a Wednesday oversight meeting, a “single event” caused the NRC to miss the goal that year.  Commissioners are set to discuss the missed goal […]

The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California is making shipments of transuranic waste to the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, a lab spokesman said Monday.  Three shipments left Lawrence Livermore for WIPP during the week of Sept. 21, Livermore spokesman Nolan O’Brien wrote in an email. Livermore crews expect to […]

Idaho-based North Wind Group got a three-year, $4.5-million task order for cleanup work at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management announced the small-business set-aside award to North Wind in a Monday press release. The new task order was issued under an existing indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract for […]

Local officials in New Jersey blocked Holtec from expanding spent fuel storage space for the shuttered Oyster Creek power plant in part because the company “mischaracterized” the facility as a temporary structure, court papers filed Monday show. “Temporary in nuclear terms means decades, not months or even years,” the Township of Lacey Planning Board wrote […]

A non-government group using commercial satellite imagery believes it caught the start of structural construction on a new, highly-secure nuclear-weapon storage facility at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming. “A satellite image taken in August and obtained from Maxar shows construction is well underway of the underground [Weapons Generation Facility (WGF)] as well as several […]

The Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina has completed its 8-gallon pilot shipment of wastewater to a private disposal site in West Texas under the agency’s new interpretation of high-level waste. The shipment from the Savannah River Defense Waste Processing Facility to Waste Control Specialists (WCS) in Andrew County, Texas, concluded Tuesday, […]

The Department of Energy could release its request for proposals for infrastructure support services at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio by Thanksgiving. In a notice posted Friday on a federal procurement website, the DOE’s Office of Environmental Management said to expect such a solicitation within 15 to 60 days for replacement of the current five-year, […]

The Los Alamos National Laboratory confirmed a pair of COVID-19 cases among its workforce last week, during which the lab performed nearly 400 tests for the viral disease, a spokesperson said late Friday. That brings the total number of confirmed cases at the lab since the start of the outbreak to 59, the spokesperson for […]