Publications: ExchangeMonitor Morning Briefing

Full security training for the nation’s commercial reactors probably won’t resume “until sometime next year,” said Shana Helton, acting deputy director for the Office of Nuclear Security and Incident Response for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.  Helton spoke Tuesday at a staff briefing for NRC commissioners about the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.  The NRC has granted numerous […]

The Senate Armed Services Committee is calling in the head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, the commander of U.S. Strategic Command, and the undersecretary of defense in charge of nuclear weapons procurement for a very-late-in-the-season hearing on the civilian weapons agency’s budget. The hearing, “Matters Relating to the Budget of the National Nuclear Security […]

Starting Oct. 5, a new Amentum-led team will begin a 60-day transition to take over as prime contractor for the mostly solid-waste cleanup of the Hanford Site’s central plateau, the Department of Energy said Tuesday. Central Plateau Cleanup Co., comprised of Amentum, Fluor, and Atkins, won the potentially 10-year, $10 billion contract in December. A […]

With Bruce Hamilton’s Sept. 12 resignation as chairman, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board is back down to three members, two of them Democrats. The chairman unexpectedly resigned Aug. 31, apparently for family reasons, only weeks after he and the three other DNFSB members were confirmed for new terms by the U.S. Senate via voice […]

The Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management says 8 gallons of recycled wastewater from the Savannah River Site in South Carolina can be hauled to a Texas disposal facility with minimal risk. Shipping the waste from the SRS Defense Waste Processing Facility to the Waste Control Specialists disposal site in West Texas will be the […]

As if figuring out how to safely resume operations during a pandemic isn’t tough enough, the Energy Department’s Hanford Site in Washington state continues to tell many workers to stay home because of smoky air. Poor air quality from fires across Oregon and Washington prompted Hanford management to keep many non-essential employees home again today. […]

There will be no emergency management drills at the Energy Department’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina until early 2021, according to a recently posted weekly report on the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board’s website. An Aug. 21 report from board inspectors to Christopher Roscetti, the board’s technical director, indicated that leaders of the respective […]

The Air Force’s program to acquire a new fleet of nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles, which fast became a one-horse race that Northrop Grumman won, is a model for the sort of procurement ethos that will help the U.S. acquire new weapons as fast as China, the commander of U.S. nuclear forces said Monday. “China can […]

Turab Lookman, a former Los Alamos physicist, dodged a six-month prison sentence last week, when a federal judge sentenced him to five years probation and a fine for lying to federal investigators about his connection to China’s Thousand Talents program. With good behavior, Lookman’s probation might end sooner, according to the sentencing minute sheet filed […]

The Government Accountability Office is tracking DOE’s progress on returning the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico to a pre-accident operations clip and plans a full report this year, an official with Congress’ investigative arm said recently. The report will be among the first comprehensive external looks at DOE’s efforts to transition its unique, […]

Lured by the prize of a megabuck contract, more than 150 individuals and 60 organizations registered to take part in online briefings last week on the planned remediation deal at the Energy Department’s Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee. The list of firms that turned out to kick the tires and learn more about the potentially […]

Fresh from his primary victory over Rep. Joe Kennedy (D-Mass.), Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) led a big chunk of the Senate’s Democratic caucus, including the minority leader, in calling on conferees to maintain a prohibition against nuclear-explosive testing in the final version of the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act. “A U.S. nuclear weapons testing restart […]

The Oregon Department of Energy has promoted Maxwell Woods to the post of administrator for nuclear safety and emergency preparedness division, succeeding Ken Niles who recently retired. Woods has been with the Oregon DOE for six years, most recently serving as the senior policy advisor and team leader in the Energy Facility Siting Division. He […]

The Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management acknowledged late Friday afternoon it will not remove remaining stranded drums of potentially-combustible transuranic waste from temporary storage in Andrews County, Texas this year. “Due to the unique technical considerations” of removing the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) TRU from Waste Control Specialists, “as well as still-to-be-determined impacts […]

The Energy Department’s Office of Nuclear Energy should soon formally kick off market research for a consolidation interim storage facility for spent fuel, the head of that program, said Friday at RadWaste Summit. “We have been working on an RFI -slash-RFP,” DOE Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy Rita Baranwal said, referring to a request for […]

The story “Post-WIPP Disposal ‘Far and Away’ Biggest TRU Waste Challenge for NNSA Pit Mission, Official Says,” [Weapons Complex Morning Briefing, Sept. 10, 2020] should have said that James McConnell, the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) associate administrator for safety, infrastructure, and operations, said disposal of transuranic waste will be the NNSA’s biggest waste-management challenge, […]

Smoke from regional fires prompted management at the Energy Department’s Hanford Site in Washington state to tell some workers to stay home. In an overnight notice published on the Hanford DOE website, management said swing and graveyard shifts for Sunday, along with the daytime for Monday morning, were cancelled for nonessential workers north and south […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration finished building a non-nuclear prototype of the B61-12, a refurbished version of the oldest deployed U.S. nuclear weapon that will homogenize four existing versions of the nuclear gravity bomb. The semiautonomous DOE nuclear weapons agency announced the milestone late last week in a press release. Personnel assembled the B61-12 first […]

NAC International is considering its options for responding to a recent finding from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that it had seemingly breached federal regulations in a design update for a used-nuclear fuel storage cask, an executive said Friday. “NAC does not at this point, having just received the details set forth in the inspection report, […]

The COVID-19 pandemic helped sell the top brass at the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management on the value of telecommuting, the No. 2 official there said Wednesday. When the DOE office was forced to roll back on-site work at nuclear remediation operations starting in mid-March, “a lot of people had their doubts” on the […]

Addressing the elephant in the desert, an official with the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) on Wednesday warned that ongoing nuclear-weapon maintenance will require a transuranic waste disposal site that is open beyond 2050: the current, best-case availability for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. “From an NNSA perspective, with an enduring mission, […]

Issue watchers debated Wednesday whether the secret nuclear weapon discussed in Bob Woodward’s new book about President Donald Trump is the W76-2 low-yield warhead. According to a leaked passage from the Watergate journalist’s soon-to-be-published book, Rage, Trump told Woodward in an interview, sometime between December and July, that “I have built a nuclear — a […]

The Air Force’s award on Tuesday to Northrop Grumman [NOC] of a contract for the next-generation ICBM system for the Air Force has given teammate L3Harris Technologies [LHX] an entrée into the service’s training market for global strike systems, L3Harris said on Wednesday. L3Harris said it will do system and software design for at least eight training systems, building […]

A top official with the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management declined Wednesday to specify when a new subcontractor might be selected to finish building a new underground ventilation system for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. “It is certainly a high-priority for us,” Todd Shrader, DOE’s principal deputy assistant secretary for environmental […]

The top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) said Tuesday the final, conferenced version of the fiscal year defense authorization likely won’t be completed until after the Nov. 3 election. Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), the outgoing HASC ranking member, noted the conference committee will need to particularly work on settling differences between the […]

A panel of specialists at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has rejected a petition from a pair of Texas-based oil and gas interests to reopen its case for a hearing in the licensing of Holtec International’s planned spent-fuel storage facility in New Mexico. The three-member Atomic Safety and Licensing Board (ASLB) essentially decided that Fasken Land […]