Publications: Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor

In a revised order, the Department of Energy has relaxed the firewall it attempted to erect between personnel at nuclear-weapon sites and the federal agency responsible for sniffing out potential threats to public safety from those operations. The Energy Department shared a draft of the revised Order 140.1 with the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) in […]

The lawyers for a disgraced former Los Alamos National Laboratory physicist who pleaded guilty to lying about his involvement with a Chinese talent-recruiting program said his client should not be sentenced to prison on the technical grounds that the deception did not amount to perjury, which under federal sentencing guidelines could carry harsher penalties than […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) last week finalized environmental paperwork that completes a court-ordered re-review of earthquake risks at the Uranium Processing Facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn. — but environmental groups with a live lawsuit over the plan are complaining that the agency’s second look was not adequate. The finalized supplement analysis, published July […]

Bruce Blair, the missileer turned nonproliferation scholar and activist, died Sunday following a sudden illness, Global Zero, the advocacy organization he co-founded in 2007, announced Monday. The Global Zero statement did not specify the cause of death, nor identify any survivors for Blair — a prolific writer and advocate for nuclear arms-minimization who often warned about the […]

Marshall Billingslea’s bid to become the Trump Administration’s top nuclear arms negotiator may not have been knocked off easy street yet, but it certainly encountered some potholes in his confirmation hearing this week, when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s top Democrat said the nominee is stained by his support of torture and generally unfit for […]

Active cases of COVID-19 at civilian nuclear-weapon sites jumped by 34 this week in the largest week-over-week increase the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has acknowledged since it began sharing data about confirmed infections. That makes for a total of 129 active cases among federal employees and contractors at the semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration plans to host another virtual job fair, this time on July 22. The semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear weapons agency set a goal of hiring 130 people this summer, specifically in Albuquerque, N.M.; Amarillo, Texas; Kansas City, Mo.; Las Vegas, Nev.; Livermore, Calif.; Oak Ridge, Tenn.; Aiken, S.C., and Washington, D.C,  […]

It will take at least until 2021 before the University of Washington can reopen a building contaminated with cesium-137 by a 2019 radiological source-removal gone wrong — and some of the facility might have to be torn down and rebuilt, a university official said Wednesday. “The current timeline has remediation going basically to the end of […]

The leader of the National Nuclear Security Administration this week pushed back against a gavel-wielding congressman’s public claim that the semiautonomous agency is increasingly dismissive of the authority for its work held by its parent entity, the Department of Energy. Rep. Frank Pallone (D.N.J.), chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committe, made the statement […]

A 2021 spending bill the House Appropriations Committee passed this week would prohibit development of a proposed new nuclear warhead for the Navy while upping investments in infrastructure to produce new plutonium triggers — but not by as much as the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) wants. That is according to a detailed bill report for […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) will soon consider alternatives to breaking down nuclear-weapon cores for disposal at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico as part of a plan to eliminate 34 metric tons of excess plutonium, an agency official said this week. Dilute and dispose, officially the Surplus Plutonium Disposition Program, involves […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has not missed a single milestone in the six months since the first case of COVID-19 was recorded on U.S. shores and four months since the World Health Organization declared the disease a pandemic, the agency’s leader said this week. “Faced with the unprecedented challenges created by the COVID-19 […]

The Department of Defense would get at least close to its requested funding for most strategic nuclear weapons programs in fiscal 2021, under a spending bill approved on a party-line vote Tuesday by the House Appropriations Committee. The bill passed 30-21 with no Republican support. Nobody offered amendments that would affect nuclear weapons funding during […]

An employee at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee died this week from COVID-19, as confirmed cases of the disease across the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) complex again shot up by double digits. The Y-12 worker “reportedly contracted the virus from a contact outside of work,” an agency spokesperson wrote Friday in an […]

As part of what it has dubbed a good-faith effort to better cooperate with the federal government’s independent nuclear health-and-safety watchdog, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) this month delivered an updated plan for implementing safety recommendations for the Pantex Plant in Texas. Whether the changes will convince the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) […]

The Senate last week reappointed the three serving members on the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) and filled one of its vacant positions. The Senate on July 2 by voice vote approved the nominations of Thomas Summers, Joyce Connery, Jessie Hill Roberson, and Bruce Hamilton, according to the website Congress.gov. Summers is the only […]

Consolidated Nuclear Security (CNS) has replaced nearly 10,000 sprinkler heads at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee, completing a $46 million retrofit of safety hardware last touched in the 1960s, according to a press release this week. The new sprinkler heads, installed in six different facilities, replace some that were at or near the […]

The Senate last week adopted language that would scale back, but not eliminate, some of the new oversight and influence the chamber’s Armed Services Committee proposed to give the Pentagon over civilian nuclear weapons budgets via the fiscal 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). On July 2, the Senate unanimously adopted an amendment from Sens. […]

A House Appropriations panel this week followed through with its promise not to grant a $20-billion budget request for civilian nuclear weapons programs, approving instead $18 billion for fiscal 2021 as part of a spending bill that would also forbid preparation for a nuclear yield-test, limit Pentagon influence on Department of Energy budgets, and potentially […]

The Navy portion of the House Armed Services Committee’s draft of the fiscal 2021 defense authorization bill approved last week would add two vessels over the Senate version and argued a second attack submarine is needed to maintain the schedule for Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines. The final HASC markup recommends authorizing the first Columbia-class ballistic […]

William Goldstein confirmed Tuesday he will retire as director of the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, as soon as the nation’s second nuclear-design facility finishes the potentially lengthy search for a replacement. Goldstein became the Livermore, Calif., lab’s 12th director on March 31, 2014. He joined the laboratory’s Physics Directorate in 1984 and remained […]

A federal judge has delayed sentencing the former Los Alamos National Laboratory physicist who pleaded guilty to lying about his connection to a Chinese talent recruitment program, giving the defense attorney a chance to persuade the court not to send his client to prison. It is the second sentencing delay for Turab Lookman, who worked at […]

There were 23 new active cases of COVID-19 this week at National Nuclear Security Administration sites, marking a second consecutive week of double-digit increases across the civilian nuclear security enterprise. That makes for a total of 69 active cases, up from 46 just before the Independence Day holiday, a spokesperson for the semiautonomous Energy Department […]

It is “likely” that some of a group of 15 Los Alamos National Laboratory employees were internally contaminated with plutonium-238 oxide that leaked out of a ruptured glove-box glove on June 8, the Department of Energy nuclear-weapon facility said this week. “Early bioassay results indicate low level intakes are likely in some of these workers,” […]

Nuclear spending debates in Congress often pit active weapons programs against the remediation of shuttered Manhattan Project and Cold War production sites, but this year’s proceeding has lawmakers on both sides of the aisle on guard against a provision they say could permanently subordinate legacy environmental programs to the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). Sen. […]

National Nuclear Security Administration sites this week started receiving respirators ordered in April to help protect personnel from COVID-19. It was forward progress in a week where COVID-19 cases nationwide continued to spike, and DOE headquarters cleared more federal employees to return to Washington-area buildings in the second phase of the agency’s return-to-the-office plan. As […]

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 […]