Publications: ExchangeMonitor Morning Briefing

Navarro Research and Engineering earned 90% of its available fee – not including any incentive fee — for its environmental work at the Energy Department’s Nevada National Nuclear Site (NNSS) over a 16-month period ended Jan. 31. That’s the crux of a recently published fee performance scorecard from the DOE Office of Environmental Management. Oak-Ridge, […]

The Energy Department Office of Environmental Management is expected to decide soon whether to keep Nuclear Waste Partnership in place as the prime contractor for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico. The joint partnership between Amentum (formerly AECOM Management Services) and BWX Technologies is working under the first option of its $2.4 […]

The Sandia National Laboratories cleared out a couple buildings on its New Mexico campus last week after confirming positive cases of COVID-19 there, though one of the facilities reopened before the weekend was out. Sandia announced Friday that both Building 836 and Building 867 had closed after a postive test was confirmed among the occupants […]

The top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee anticipates bipartisan support for the panel’s version of the next defense authorization bill, while adding he wants to see provisions for the Pentagon’s chief management officer and troop movement from Germany addressed at Wednesday’s markup hearing. “I am hopeful, I would say very hopeful, that at […]

The Energy Department intends to retain Swift & Staley for up to six more months as the infrastructure support services provider at the Paducah Site in Kentucky. Paducah-based Swift & Staley’s $192 million contract dates to December 2015 and is set to expire in September 2020. As the firm’s initial three-year base period was expiring […]

NorthStar Group Services has requested approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for disposal in Idaho of 2 million gallons of wastewater from decommissioning at the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. The agency on June 23 informed a subsidiary of the New York City-based environmental solutions provider, NorthStar Nuclear Decommissioning Co., that it had accepted the […]

Representatives of more than 40 companies attended the June 24 industry pre-proposal conference for the upcoming contract for cleanup of the Luckey Site in Ohio under the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program (FUSRAP). The Army Corps on June 26 posted the attendance list, along with the first tranche of […]

An employee at the Germantown, Md., branch of Department of Energy headquarters tested positive for COVID-19 just days before that building advanced to Phase 1 of the agency’s remobilization plan. As far as DOE’s contact tracing showed Friday, nobody who was in close contact with the infected Germantown worker became sick, according to a statement from […]

Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) said last week he favors increasing funding for the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina by more than $51 million above the Donald Trump administration’s fiscal 2021 budget request, mostly to finance improvements at the H Canyon complex. Wilson noted that H Canyon as the only hardened nuclear […]

A batch of low-level radioactive waste (LLRW) will complete its journey to disposal by truck after a fire near Chicago earlier this month on a railcar being used to transport it to Texas. “The transloaded waste is being re-profiled to be shipped by truck,” a spokesperson for Veolia subsidiary Alaron Nuclear Services, which generated the […]

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is allowing Holtec International to delay conducting a mandatory force-on-force security exercise at the retired Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Massachusetts during the COVID-19 pandemic. The federal regulator issued the exemption on June 18. The document was posted Friday to the agency’s website. Nuclear licensees for months have received expedited NRC […]

The chairman’s mark for the House of Representatives’ fiscal 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) would add about $700 million to the top line for the Trump administration’s $5 billion request for defense environmental cleanup operations managed by the Department of Energy. House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.) released his mark over the […]

More National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) employees may return to work in Washington, D.C.-area headquarters buildings today at the start of Phase 2 of the Department of Energy’s return-to-work plan for federal personnel. There are about 1,000 NNSA employees at the Forrestal Building in downtown D.C., and the Germantown Building in nearby suburban Maryland. They […]

Half of the 1,800-person cleanup workforce at the Idaho National Laboratory is back on-site after months of reduced operations due to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to contractor Fluor Idaho. An additional 30% are still teleworking, a company spokesperson said by email Thursday. The Fluor Idaho representative did not immediately say if the rest are collecting paid […]

To settle a 2018 lawsuit over storage of plutonium, the Department of Energy tentatively agreed not to send more of the weapon-usable material to Nevada, the state said Friday. Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford announced the development in a press release summarizing the unpublished settlement between the Silver State and DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration […]

Like death and taxes, the federal regulatory process continues amid the COVID-19 pandemic, as evidenced by Centrus Energy’s submission of a license application to enrich a 19.75% enriched uranium fuel. The Bethesda, Md.-based company is building a new 16-machine cascade based on its AC100M technology at the Energy Department’s Portsmouth Site near Piketon, Ohio. The […]

A day after the National Nuclear Security Administration announced it would not pick up the remaining options on the existing management deal for its Y-12 and Pantex sites, the Government Accountability Office urged the agency to study whether the outgoing contractor’s cost-saving methods could work at other nuclear-weapon sites. Consolidated Nuclear Security (CNS) in 2014 […]

The Senate Armed Services Committee on Wednesday reported out two nominations to the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) via voice vote. The nominations of serving DNFSB member Joyce Connery and new nominee Thomas Summers now advance to the full Senate. No date has been set for a floor vote. Connery joined the board in […]

Centerra Group, the incumbent provider of paramilitary security at the Energy Department’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina, has withdrawn a Government Accountability Office (GAO) protest over procurement of a follow-on contract. Centerra filed the protest May 8, but then withdrew it on June 9, according to a notice posted on the GAO website. The […]

A coalition of environmental organizations on Wednesday petitioned a federal appeals court to overturn a Nuclear Regulatory Commission decision against challenges to a proposed consolidated interim used nuclear fuel installation in New Mexico. On April 23, the commission rejected nearly all appeals from several organizations to a 2019 decision by an NRC Atomic Safety and […]

The story “Pentagon Would Get More Control of NNSA Budget Under Senate Committee’s NDAA,” (Weapons Complex Morning Briefing, June 24, 2020) should have included links and attribution to outside reporting about the Department of Energy’s internal budget debate for the 2021 fiscal year. The story was updated to clarify the timeline of events during those […]

Another worker at the Energy Department’s Hanford Site in Washington state tested posted for COVID-19 this week, bringing the total number of cases to 17 at the former plutonium production complex. The individual works at the Waste Treatment Plant being built by Bechtel, according to the Energy Department website that provides updates on COVID-19. Access […]

The Department of Energy will not pick up the remaining options on Bechtel National-led Consolidated Nuclear Security’s contract to manage the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee and Pantex Plant in Texas, which now will expire after Sept. 30, 2021. Consolidated Nuclear Security (CNS) will leave three years’ worth of options on the table. The […]

A draft federal environmental impact statement (EIS) for a proposed used nuclear fuel storage site in New Mexico only looks at the next 40 years, and does not sufficiently consider that the radioactive material might remain there long past that point, opponents of the project argued Tuesday. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission held a public meeting […]

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has formally accepted for review an Energy Department proposal to dispose of vitrified low-activity waste inside the fence at the Hanford Site in Washington state. The Energy Department on April 23 filed its draft Waste Incidental to Reprocessing (WIR) evaluation with the NRC, which in this case is serving as […]

Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL) has terminated one of the primary contracts for remediation of radioactive contamination at Port Hope, Ontario. As of June 30, Ottawa-based Milestone Environmental Contracting will no longer be in charge of cleanup of Port Hope Harbor and the Center Pier under the Port Hope Area Initiative, according to a press release […]