Publications: ExchangeMonitor Morning Briefing

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 […]

Amentum Holdings agreed to acquire DynCorp International in a deal that would broaden its defense services business into aviation and logistics support. Terms of the pending transaction, which is slated to close in the fourth quarter of 2020 subject to regulatory approvals, were not disclosed. Amentum is acquiring DynCorp from the investment firm Cerberus Capital Management, which acquired […]

Most Americans don’t like the way 2020 is playing out, at least if social media posts are any guide, and the first eight months of the year have not gone well for productivity at the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. There have been 121 shipments from Jan. 1 through Aug. […]

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission plans to complete the Three Mile Island Unit 2 license transfer by fall of this year, according to Bruce Watson, Chief of the NRC Reactor Decommissioning Branch. If approved, GPU Nuclear, the FirstEnergy subsidiary that currently owns the reactor, will be allowed to transfer its license to a TMI-2 Solutions, […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration will soon finish an environmental review that will allow the civilian nuclear-weapons agency to formalize a decision to make plutonium pits in South Carolina, a source said Wednesday. The semiautonomous Department of Energy agency had approved the final site-specific environmental impact statement this week and could publish it any day, […]

More than half of the Department of Energy’s 11,000-member workforce at the Hanford Site are back inside the fence, a Department of Energy official said Wednesday. Hanford is bringing 190 additional workers back onsite this week, Erik Olds, DOE’s deputy integration manager for direct-feed low-activity waste, told the Hanford Advisory Board during an online meeting. […]

The Department of Energy wants to delay some tank-related nuclear weapons cleanup work at the Hanford Site because of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, attendees said this week during an online meeting of the Hanford Advisory Board. Dealing with the novel coronavirus delayed some projects at the former plutonium production site, the Department of Justice said […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration is consulting with Norway on a study about whether the nordic nation can downblend its own stock of highly enriched uranium and thorium, U.S. and Norwegian officials announced this week. In 2020, the semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear weapons agency expects to spend only about $50,000 on the effort, which […]

The head of the nuclear waste cleanup program at the Washington state Department of Ecology is leaving the position at the end of October to take another job with the state. Ecology cleanup director Alex Smith is moving to a position with the Washington Department of Natural Resources as the deputy supervisor for aquatics, she […]

Holtec plans to submit its license transfer application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to acquire the Palisades Power Plant by the end of this year or early 2021, Andrea Sterdis, Holtec’s vice president of regulatory & environmental affairs, said Tuesday. The company announced plans to acquire the Covert, Michigan-based plant from Entergy Corp. for decommissioning […]

Gene Sievers is taking over as manager of the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., backfilling a position left vacant after his predecessor was promoted as part of the leadership shuffle that ensued when Morgan Smith retired as head of the outgoing nuclear-weapons production-site prime. Sievers, most recently vice president of the Bechtel […]