Publications: Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor

As of Friday, with only weeks to go before it hoped to transition the sites to new management, the National Nuclear Security Administration had yet to hold discussions with bidders for the next contract to manage the Pantex Plant and the Y-12 National Security Complex, sources said. The new contract has a four-month transition period […]

The Department of Energy is picking up its option to keep Centerra Group on through at least Oct. 7 as provider of security at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina while the agency continues to review a 10-year, $1-billion follow-on contract awarded in February to Securitas CIS. A DOE spokesperson said in an email late last […]

Ex-Sandia National Laboratories employee Joshua Cordova has pleaded guilty to four counts of fraud and now awaits a sentencing in the U.S. District Court for New Mexico after allegedly ripping off the government for somewhere between $75,000 and $140,000, according to a plea agreement filed last week. Cordova, who helped train military, law-enforcement and emergency […]

A swap of common shares for preferred shares led to a $2.2-million first-quarter loss for Centrus Energy Corp.’s  common shareholders, as revenue rose across the board, the Bethesda, Md.-based nuclear fuel reseller and enrichment technology developer wrote in its latest quarterly earnings report. Centrus’ net income was $5.1 million for the three months ended March […]

Early in-person voting started last week and runs through May 29, for the June 1 special election in New Mexico’s Congressional District 1, which is home to the Sandia National Laboratories. The seat was vacated by Rep. Debra Haaland (D), she was confirmed as the Joe Biden administration’s secretary of interior on March 16. The special election […]

The Joe Biden administration will start its nuclear posture review soon and work on it into the fall, there’s no new Minuteman III life-extension study at the Pentagon and bad welds on some missile tubes won’t delay delivery of the first Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine, witnesses testified late Wednesday before a Senate Armed Services panel. […]

In a week where the federal government said people fully vaccinated against COVID-19 can safely return to some forms of maskless, pre-pandemic socializing, active cases of the viral disease fell across the National Nuclear Security Administration complex as vaccinations rose. The agency reported 138 active cases of COVID-19 among its civilians and contractors on Friday, […]

Fluor, Irving, Texas, suffered a net loss from continuing operations of $61 million compared with a net gain of $21.6 million during the first quarter of 2020, the international engineering and construction company said Friday. A $68-million expense linked to development of its NuScale small modular reactor business, and other costs, contributed to the slide, […]

During a nearly three-hour budget hearing into which nuclear weapons seldom figured, Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said Thursday she supports building a two-state complex to produce at least 80 plutonium pits annually.  That’s among the most, if not the most, definitive statement of support any senior Biden-administration official has made for the National Nuclear […]

An unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile was unable to conduct a planned test launch from Vandenberg AFB, Calif. on May 5th. “The unarmed missile in test configuration reacted exactly as it was designed, terminating the launch on the ground when it detected a fault in its launch sequence,” U.S. Air Force Global Strike Command […]

A program-independent review found the cost-floor for building the National Nuclear Security Administration’s planned, multibillion-dollar pit factory at the Los Alamos National Laboratory will be slightly higher than the official estimate, though the ceiling might be a little lower. The Los Alamos Plutonium Pit Production Project (LAP4) and supporting infrastructure should cost between $2.93 billion […]

Teresa Robbins replaced Geoff Beausoleil as manager of the National Nuclear Security Administration field office responsible for the Pantex Plant and the Y-12 National Security Site, according to the government’s nuclear health-and-safety watchdog. Robbins, one of Beausoleil’s two deputies at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Production Office, was set to take over May 1. Beausoleil […]

BWX Technologies is among the companies in the hunt for high-dollar Department of Energy contracts, president and CEO Rex Geveden said in a conference call this week with financial analysts. “We now have four large DOE proposals submitted and anticipate three of those contracts to be announced sometime later this year,” Geveden told Wall Street […]

The number of second-dose vaccines administered at the Pantex Plant in Texas and the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee doubled this week with over 4,000 employees fully vaccinated across both sites, as the number of jabs continues to increase across the rest of the nuclear security enterprise,  NNSA’s Washington headquarters was tracking 232 active […]

The Department of Energy’s semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration this week appointed two new deputy managers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory field office in New Mexico. Jason Saenz will be the new deputy manager for technical operations and Paula “Erika” Wisdom will be the deputy manager for business, security and missions as a new […]

BY MATTHEW BEINART President Joe Biden announced this week he is nominating Frank Kendall, a former top acquisition official at the Pentagon, as the next secretary of the Air Force and Heidi Shyu, the Army’s former lead acquisition executive, to be the next undersecretary of defense for Research and Engineering. Both nominations were announced Tuesday […]

The Department of Energy this week published the highly-anticipated draft solicitation for a potential 10-year, $21.5-billion management and operations contract for the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. The draft request for proposals (RFP) was published Wednesday on a federal procurement website to solicit questions and comments from prospective bidders by 4 p.m. Eastern time […]

The U.S. Senate voted Tuesday to approve the nomination of Colin Kahl’s nomination for the Pentagon’s top policy job on a party-line vote of 49-to-45. President Joe Biden’s pick to be undersecretary of defense for policy, Kahl failed to win a single Republican vote, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), the top GOP member on the Senate […]

A week after a coalition of citizen groups threatened to sue without more environmental vetting, the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration approved the first critical decision toward ramping up pit production at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Wednesday said it has approved Critical Decision […]

Kansas City, Mo.-based Burns & McDonnell recently named Willie Clark as its federal strategy director, the company announced this week. For the previous almost nine years, Clark had been the giant engineering corporation’s federal business development manager, according to the company’s Wednesday news release. He held positions with the National Nuclear Security Administration from 1987 […]

President Joe Biden this week formally sent to the Senate Frank Rose’s nomination to be principal deputy administrator for the Department of Energy’s semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration. Last week  Biden announced his intention to nominate Rose to the No. 2 slot at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which oversees the nation’s nuclear weapons […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration failed to follow federal best practices for acquisitions prior to ordering its $600-million El Capitan high-performance computing system, a congressional watchdog said in a report this week. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) urged National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to do a more detailed analysis of alternatives in the future, and […]

The acting deputy manager of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Nevada field office will take over her role in an official capacity, the agency announced this week. Laura M. Tomlinson will take over as deputy manager of the Nevada Field Office (NFO) after serving as acting deputy since last February, according to a press release […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration and the prime contractor for the Y-12 Nuclear Security Complex at Oak Ridge, Tenn., are working with the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management to shrink the high-security protected area around Y-12 by almost  half. Ground was broken April 7 on the $160-million West End Protected Area Reduction project, […]

Public interest groups are ready to sue the Department of Energy and its semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration over what they claim is insufficient review of plans for expanded plutonium pit production in South Carolina and New Mexico. The coalition claims the government failed to adequately review plans to “vastly ramp up production” of nuclear […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration has “limited information on the prevalence of sexual harassment” in its nuclear security forces and needs to take steps to comply with federal anti-harassment policies, said a government study published this week. The NNSA currently doesn’t meet the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s (EEOC) guidelines on responding to and preventing […]