Publications: Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor

The vendor providing paramilitary security for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina received its second four-month contract extension this week, keeping it on the job at least through June 7. The option with DOE was signed Thursday, Suzanne Piner, a spokeswoman for Centerra Group parent company Constellis, said by email. […]

Lynchburg, Va. -based BWX Technologies has promoted Richard Loving to the newly created post of senior vice president and chief administrative officer (CAO). Loving has been senior vice president for human resources at BWXT since mid-2016. He has about 40 years of management experience in manufacturing, energy, and government operations, according to a press release. That […]

The U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) pledged to this year implement several incremental steps toward a common financial reporting system that Congress has ordered put in place by December, according to a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report. The GAO’s report includes a letter from NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty describing three steps the agency would […]

Citing the dwindling power of arms control agreements and escalating tensions with adversarial nations, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists this week moved the hands of its symbolic Doomsday Clock 20 seconds closer to a metaphorical midnight that symbolizes the extinction of humanity via general thermonuclear war, civilization-altering climate change, or both. In a press […]

A recently unsealed lawsuit accuses a former U.S. Department of Energy contractor at the Savannah River Site’s now-canceled plutonium recycling plant of filings thousands of dollars’ worth of false claims by paying out a relocation package to an employee who never actually moved. Then, when employee Peter Michael Wanco Jr. resigned from MOX Services after […]

Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII) said Monday it has appointed Brandi Smith as program director for the U.S. Navy’s Columbia-class submarine program at the company’s Newport News Shipbuilding division. There was no incumbent Columbia program director at HII, according to a Tuesday email from a spokesperson for the shipbuilding subcontractor for the Navy’s next nuclear-armed ballistic-missile submarine fleet. […]

The story “Centerra Parent Downgraded by Credit Raters, Signs Forbearance Agreement” (Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor, Vol. 24, No. 03, Jan. 17, 2020) should have reported that Centerra’s paramilitary security contract extension at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina was scheduled to expire in February. The U.S. Energy Department can exercise two more four-month options […]

The former Los Alamos National Laboratory physicist is set today to change his plea of not guilty to charges that he lied about alleged connections to a Chinese-sponsored talent-recruiting program, a new court filing shows. Turab Lookman’s plea-change hearing is slated for 10 a.m. local time in U.S. District Court for New Mexico in Albuquerque. The […]

The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) hopes to meet soon with new U.S. Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette to discuss public health and safety issues at nuclear sites overseen by his agency. In a Jan. 16 letter, DNFSB Chairman Bruce Hamilton congratulated Brouillette on his December confirmation as energy secretary and said the board would […]

The head of the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and the secretary of energy are reportedly at odds over the weapons agency’s 2021 budget request, which would be at least $17.5 billion and perhaps as high as $20 billion for the coming fiscal year, a new digital publication reported this week. The Dispatch, a […]

An Air Force three-star general has been nominated to become the deputy commander of U.S. Strategic Commander, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said Monday. Lt. Gen. Thomas Bussiere currently serves as commander of the Alaskan Command at U.S. Northern Command, as well as the commander of the 11th Air Force at Pacific Air Forces, and commander of […]

A federal judge is not pulling the plug yet on Nevada’s lawsuit to have a half-metric ton of plutonium trucked out of the state, despite the Department of Energy’s repeated requests to dismiss the case. The U.S. District Court for Nevada has scheduled a teleconference for March 12 to discuss the state’s desire to conduct […]

In what could be the final brief before an appeals panel rules on the case, South Carolina hammered home its argument that federal law does not prohibit the Department of Energy from paying $200 million in fines after blowing a legal deadline to remove plutonium from the state. South Carolina is appealing the case after […]

Constellis, the Reston, Va.-based parent of U.S. Energy Department contractor Centerra Group, has reached a “forbearance agreement” with certain creditors in order to get some leeway on loan repayment while it works to shore up its balance sheet. “Constellis recently closed on a $110 million delayed-draw credit facility provided by a subset of its existing […]

An article in the Jan. 10 issue of Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor, “Pit TRU Waste Would Take Up Half of Available WIPP Space Over 50 Years, NNSA Says,” should have said remarks by Todd Shrader of the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management were delivered in June 2018.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico still plans this year to begin the next round of subcritical plutonium experiments, a series dubbed Nightshade. “In order to accommodate ongoing experiment preparation, facility work, and other programmatic priorities the Laboratory is planning to execute the Nightshade A SCE [subcritical experiment] in […]

The U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) this week moved to extend its contract with the panel of scientists known as JASON for up to a year, while the Pentagon works to resurrect its old arrangement with the group. Also this week, the JASON team endorsed a plan for the semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear […]

The U.S. Air Force officially ended the B52-H’s mission to carry nuclear gravity bombs late last year, according to an updated operating military manual making the rounds online this week. Air Force Instruction 91-111, dated Sept. 5, calls for “removal of B61-7 and B83-1 from B-52H approved weapons configuration.” Hans Kristensen, the Washington-based director of […]

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The head of the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) would not rule out the possibility here Thursday that one of two planned production plants could independently supply all the fissile nuclear-weapon cores initially required for planned refurbishments of the nation’s nuclear weapons. “[W]e are not looking at [using] one exclusive of […]

The U.S. Department of Energy has doubled down in the new year on its refusal to accept a safety recommendation from the Defense Nuclear Faciliites Safety Board (DNFSB) regarding tritium facilities at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. “[T]he Savannah River Tritium Enterprise (SRTE) provides adequate protection of the public and worker safety,” Lisa […]

NORTH AUGUSTA, S.C. — Leveraging resources from U.S. Department of Energy contractors and research universities will be a key part of the inaugural stand-alone management and operations contract for the Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL), DOE Undersecretary for Science Paul Dabbar said Thursday. The Energy Department is planning for a contract that would separate the […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration plans a somewhat expedited environmental review of its plan to convert a partially built plutonium recycling plant at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., into a plutonium-pit factory, according to a decision posted online this week. The agency has studied since June whether it must complete a brand new environmental […]

The power substation that will route electricity to the Uranium Processing Facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn., is finished, the National Nuclear Security Administration said. The Tennessee Valley Authority designed and built the $60 million substation, the semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear weapons agency wrote in a press release on Monday. Aspects of the substation have irked […]

In a New Year’s boon for Belgium’s Institute for Radioelements, the Department of Energy has postponed by two years a ban on exporting U.S.-origin, weapon-usable uranium for the production of medical isotopes, agency head Dan Brouillette told Congress. “[C]urrent global supplies of Mo-99 [Molybdenum 99] produced without the use of HEU [highly enriched uranium] are […]

The Los Alamos National Laboratory has traced an unprecedented radioactive leak during an explosive plutonium test in 2019 to a breached diagnostic port in the steel container that housed the subcritical experiment, a lab spokesperson said this week. “A diagnostic port was momentarily displaced due to the dynamic pressure exerted on the confinement vessel during […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration’s plan to produce 80 pits a year would generate more than 1,110 cubic meters of transuranic waste a year, according to an environmental review the semiautonomous Department of Energy weapon steward released this week. Over 50 years — enough time at an 80-a-year throughput to produce two new pits, and […]