Publications: Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor

WASHINGTON — The Barack Obama administration’s National Nuclear Security Administration leadership duo whipped the Donald Trump administration here Wednesday to immediately extend the New START nuclear arms control treaty with Russia and forget, for now, about modifying the pact. The bilateral treaty, which limits Moscow and Washington to 1,550 deployed strategic nuclear warheads and 700 […]

The Department of Energy acknowledged Wednesday that for six years it sent nuclear weapons waste to the Nevada National Security Site in violation of its waste acceptance criteria. The agency confirmed the information the same day Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak (D) made it public in a press release. Senior DOE officials including Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, head of the […]

The Z Pulsed Power Facility at the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M., was back online this week after a serious accident in June knocked the facility out of commission for three weeks, a senior laboratory employee said this week. The June 17 accident, which shook Sandia’s high-energy density physics lab longer and harder than […]

The House of Representatives on Friday passed its 2020 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), after bipartisan blocks of lawmakers rejected further restrictions to the W80-4 nuclear warhead life-extension program and development of next-generation intercontinental ballistic missiles. On a more partisan basis, lawmakers voted 201-221 against an amendment from Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio) that would have […]

Preparations began this week for repairing the roof on the H Canyon facility at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina, with the physical repairs due to start later this summer. In January, the Energy Department announced plans to spend an estimated $1 million from the SRS fiscal 2019 maintenance and […]

The Department of Energy inspector general has “potential concerns” about agency oversight of $500,000 in grant money awarded to a regional group that promotes economic development around the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. That is the assessment offered in a July 2 memorandum from Deputy Inspector General Michelle Anderson to DOE Undersecretary for […]

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The site operations contractor for the Y-12 National Security Complex is finishing decontamination in Building 9995 after a furnace there blew open and spewed uranium in late May. The muffle furnace in Y-12’s Analytical Chemistry Facility partially exploded after an unexpected reaction, contaminating nearby space and equipment, but neither injuring nor contaminating any personnel, a spokesperson […]

BWX Technologies has finished a uranium conversion contract for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the agency confirmed this week. The semiautonomous Department of Energy weapons agency awarded the roughly $30-million contract in 2011 and extended it through June 30, 2019, at no cost. The NNSA wanted BWX Technologies to hold on to some converted […]

The U.S. Senate’s recently passed version of the fiscal 2020 National Defense Authorization Act calls for nine reports or briefings on Department of Energy nuclear weapon programs. Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor has listed each of them below, in the order in which they appear in the bill. None of these reports are required yet. […]

It has been more than a year now since the Department of Energy ordered stricter limits on communications with the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB), but the independent federal nuclear health-and-safety watchdog has mostly not cataloged the stonewalling connected with Order 140.1. Chairman Bruce Hamilton, in an April hearing before a House Armed Services […]

After settlement talks collapsed, a federal judge this week cleared the way for a long-awaited decision in a $200-million lawsuit between South Carolina and the Department of Energy over the federal government’s failure to remove plutonium from the state. The Energy Department and the state had for more than a year tried to settle the […]

By Richard Abott Defense Daily The U.S. should speed up efforts to develop new nuclear-capable weapons, including a “cost-effective, credible” replacement for the Trident II ballistic missile, the Chief of Naval Operations said this week. In a talk at the Mitchell Institute Tuesday in Washington, Adm. John Richardson also called for exploring capabilities such as low-yield […]

The U.S. Senate has confirmed former Pentagon and State Department career man Jeffrey Eberhardt to be special representative of the president for nuclear nonproliferation. In his new State Department job, for which he was confirmed last month, Eberhardt will be the Trump administration’s central figure in talks over international nonproliferation agreements, including for the 2020 […]

Saudi Arabia will have to sign “a very strong 123 agreement” to be counted among the “adult members of the world community” that use nuclear power, Secretary of Energy Rick Perry said this week in congressional testimony. Perry has made that point directly to the Saudi government, the Energy Department chief told the House Science […]

A federal judge this week stayed the almost 3-year old lawsuit filed by MOX Services against the National Nuclear Security Administration after the parties announced they were close to settling the $200-million-plus case over a now-terminated plutonium conversion plant in South Carolina. “After mediation, the parties have come to an agreement in principle on proposed […]

The prime contractor for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Y-12 National Security Complex continued to grapple with a fix for a hydrogen fluoride system until earlier this month — well after an April leak that prompted an evacuation of the agency’s main uranium processing building. The system in Building 9212 “returned to operation on Monday, […]

As the Air Force and wider Defense Department work to address threats posed by peer competition and to fulfill the requirements of the 2018 National Defense Strategy, the service must invest in a workforce that can build and deliver crucial capabilities to sustain the nuclear arsenal, the Air Force’s top military official said June 26. […]

DAYTON, Ohio — With a series of modernization efforts on the table for the Air Force’s aging B-52 bomber fleet, the service will decide over the next two years whether the upgrades merit a model change, officials said June 20. Brig. Gen. Heath Collins, program executive officer for fighters and bombers at the Air Force’s Lifecycle Management […]

Doug Fremont is the new chief of staff for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), an agency spokesperson said Monday. He succeeds William “Ike” White, who left to work at the Department of Energy’s Cold War nuclear-weapon cleanup program. Fremont is the former security chief for the semiautonomous DOE nuclear-weapons agency. He was removed from […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) intends to award BWX Technologies subsidiary Nuclear Fuel Services a sole-source contract to purify highly enriched uranium and convert it into metal for nuclear weapons programs. The semiautonomous nuclear-weapons steward needs Nuclear Fuel Services to step in around 2023, when the civilian agency plans to shut down existing uranium purification […]

The U.S. Senate on Thursday overwhelmingly passed a 2020 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that would authorize all the White House’s requested funding for nuclear modernization programs at the Department of Energy and the Pentagon. The Senate bill would provide a year of bipartisan support for the Donald Trump administration’s nuclear arsenal modernization plans, which […]

The Department of Energy can annually produce 80 nuclear weapon cores in two states without beginning an all-new environmental review of the full program, according to an already-contested review of the issue released on Wednesday. Instead, DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) concluded that the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) requires the agency only […]

The House of Representatives will not debate its version of the fiscal 2020 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) until after the Fourth of July, but lawmakers have already proposed several pro- and anti-nuclear amendments to the annual defense policy bill. Lawmakers proposed their amendments Tuesday to the House Rules Committee. The panel plans to set […]

The White House wants federal agencies including the Department of Energy to kill off some of their Federal Advisory Committees by September, according to a presidential order published recently. Federal Advisory Committees are nominally independent, government-chartered groups that provide advice to U.S. agencies. Either the president, Congress or agency heads can require an agency to […]

Nuclear forces worldwide in 2018 declined by roughly 4% over the course of the year, or by 600 weapons, to 13,865, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) in its latest annual yearbook on nuclear weapons. The U.S. and Russia, which have more nuclear weapons than the rest of the world’s seven nuclear-armed states combined, drove […]

AECOM plans next year to spin off the business that contracts with the U.S. Departments of Energy and Defense into a separate publicly traded company. The Los Angeles-based infrastructure multinational said Monday its Board of Directors unanimously signed off on the separation, which is expected to be completed in the second half of 2020. The […]