Publications: ExchangeMonitor Morning Briefing

James Taiclet will become president and  chief executive officer of aerospace and defense titan Lockheed Martin, of Bethesda, Md., effective June 15. He will succeed Marillyn Hewson, who has led the company since 2013, according to a Monday press release. Taiclet, who came up in the defense industry through Pratt & Whitney and was later […]

Idaho continues to assess $6,000 in daily penalties against the Department of Energy for failure to treat 900,000 gallons of sodium-bearing liquid radioactive waste at the Idaho National Laboratory, and the total is approaching $7.8 million, a state official said last week. The penalties will continue until the lab’s the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit (IWTU) […]

Energy Harbor Corp. on Friday said it had reversed its decision to retire the two reactors at its Beaver Valley Power Station in Pennsylvania. The announcement came just weeks after the former FirstEnergy Solutions emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy with a new name and no longer owned by FirstEnergy Corp. Management notified regional power transmission […]

Naval Sea Systems Command on Thursday awarded Fluor Marine Propulsion a $1.776 billion modification for naval nuclear propulsion work at the Naval Nuclear Laboratory. Work will be split between Schenectady, N.Y. (52%), Pittsburgh (31%), Idaho Falls, Idaho (11%), and Charleston, S.C. (6%). The Navy did not disclose how long the contract runs through or what additional […]

House appropriators got their first crack at acting Environmental Management head Ike White on Wednesday, when they promised the interim cleanup manager that proposed cuts to legacy nuclear waste cleanup will not stand — especially not at the Hanford Site. The script is familiar by now, written at the beginning of the Donald Trump administration’s […]

Interested bidders for the Energy Department’s potential five-year, $250-million support services contract at the Paducah Site in Kentucky have received an additional two weeks to submit a proposal. The agency announced the delayed deadline, from March 19 to April 2, Tuesday on the website for the procurement. On the website’s question-and-answer section for the contract, […]

Radiation monitors for the public went online Tuesday at the retired San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS), majority owner Southern California Edison announced Tuesday. Three gamma radiation monitors were installed on the San Diego County property in response to long-running public calls for ways to check for potential radiation leaks from spent fuel in dry-cask […]

PHOENIX — Demolition of the X-326 Process Building at the Department of Energy’s Portsmouth Site in Ohio should begin this fall, managers said here Wednesday. Cleanup contractor Fluor-BWXT finished deactivating the facility, disconnecting the utilities and making the structure “cold and dark,” in 2019, DOE Portsmouth Site Lead Jeff Bettinger said at the Waste Management […]

A facility planned for the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico could produce more nuclear-warhead cores while generating less transuranic waste than the plutonium pit factory planned at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, according to environmental documents published this year by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The agency aims to manufacture […]

An article in the Wednesday edition of Weapons Complex Morning Briefing should have said the Energy Department expects within weeks to issue a draft request for proposals for management of the Savannah River National Laboratory.

There are no known cases of COVID-19 at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory after an employee who reported exposure to the novel coronavirus tested negative for the disease, a lab spokesperson said Wednesday. “We’ve had no cases, confirmed or presumptive,” the spokesperson wrote in an email Wednesday evening. Livermore managers became aware last week of […]

PHOENIX — The Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) is no longer producing a public roundup of solicitation timelines for cleanup jobs within the nuclear weapons complex, a procurement official said here Tuesday. “We no longer have a procurement schedule on the website,” Norbert Doyle, EM deputy assistant secretary for acquisition and program management, […]

Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-Calif.) latest legislative push to establish a pilot program for interim storage of radioactive waste got stuck in Senate gridlock this week when the big, bi-partisan energy bill stalled out amid a fight about climate change. Feinstein’s proposal was one of many amendments being balled up into a legislative package known as […]

An Idaho congressman on Tuesday said he believes Congress again will choose to keep a nuclear cleanup program with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, instead of allowing it to be transferred to the Department of Energy. The program is the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program (FUSRAP), which manages remediation of properties contaminated from […]

PHOENIX — As time goes by, the Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico could increasingly dispose of transuranic material from the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), a top nuclear cleanup official said here Monday. The Idaho National Laboratory is far and away the No. 1 shipper of defense-related transuranic waste to the […]

Confirming what appeared intuitively obvious, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) said Tuesday the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico will have to manufacture 80 nuclear-weapon cores a year by itself in 2030, if a planned facility at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina is not ready by then. Planned upgrades for Los […]

Staff at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Tuesday preliminarily recommended licensing a facility in New Mexico for temporary storage of spent fuel from U.S. nuclear power plants. The tentative support is provided in the draft environmental impact statement (EIS) for Holtec International’s consolidated interim storage facility in Lea County, in the state’s southeast. “Based on […]

The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) on Tuesday canceled a planned March 19 open hearing in Aiken, S.C., about the future of the Savannah River Site. The independent federal nuclear health and safety watchdog called off the event because of witness availability, a board spokesperson said.  The DNFSB had proposed witnesses including: William (Ike) […]

A federal judge last week dismissed a discrimination lawsuit filed by a former employee of the security contractor at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina, ruling there was no proof race played a role in the worker’s termination. In the March 6 order, U.S. District Judge Terry Wooten ruled in favor […]

PHOENIX – The Department of Energy manager for the Savannah River Site said Tuesday he would not be surprised if the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) one day assumes ownership of the operations contract for the South Carolina complex. The semiautonomous DOE nuclear-weapon steward is already funding more of the work at Savannah River, SRS […]

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission in January spent just $219 of its remaining balance from the Nuclear Waste Fund. That left the agency with a balance of $430,978 from the fund intended to pay for a national repository for high-level waste from defense nuclear operations and spent fuel from commercial nuclear power plants. “While there are […]

The administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration should serve a fixed term, a National Academies panel said Monday in an interim report on a four-and-a-half-year study into nuclear security governance. The National Academies panel did not say how long the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) should serve, but the group did […]

PHOENIX – Another company indicated Monday it would be prepared to bid on an anticipated procurement from the Department of Energy to design a facility for interim storage of nuclear waste. “We are interested in interim storage,” Rod Baltzer, chief operating officer for Deep Isolation, told Weapons Complex Morning Briefing. “With our design, we do […]

A heavy equipment accident last summer indicates the prime contractor for the Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., needs to strengthen its safety oversight of subcontractors, according to a March 4 enforcement letter from DOE’s Office of Enterprise Assessments (EA). In July 2019, a backhoe operated by an employee for subcontractor […]

PHOENIX – The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is considering merging two long-running efforts to update federal regulations on disposal of radioactive waste, a senior official said here Monday. Agency staff is currently determining the paths forward for both a potential rulemaking on Greater-Than-Class C Waste and the continuing Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Rulemaking, according to Patricia […]

PHOENIX –The Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management is still drafting its response to a Texas state agency on plans for removal of potentially combustible drums of radioactive material from Waste Control Specialists (WCS) in Andrews County. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) wants a federal plan by the end of this month for removal […]

Amid the continuing spread of COVID-19, the novel coronavirus disease, the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapon-design laboratories have canceled the unclassified 2020 Strategic Weapons in the 21st Century summit scheduled for Thursday in Washington, D.C. This would have been the 13th year for the annual summit, co-hosted by the Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos national […]

PHOENIX — By the end of 2020, the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management expects to start operation of facilities in Idaho and South Carolina that will convert radioactive tank waste into stable forms for eventual disposal, agency officials said here Monday. The Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF) at the Savannah River Site in South […]