Publications: Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor

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 […]

People in Nevada don’t want to see the U.S. government resume underground explosive-nuclear weapons testing in their state, Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) said Tuesday during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.   “Nevadans do not want to return to a time when there was explosive nuclear testing in our state,” Rosen told Admiral Charles Richard, commander […]

Reducing the political space for dialogue with Russia was a “critical error” in U.S. foreign policy and will hamper efforts to negotiate a new strategic arms limitation treaty with Moscow, a former energy secretary said during a webinar this week. There’s “a lot of interest” in a new arms control treaty on both sides of […]

Across the National Nuclear Security Administration’s sites and Washington headquarters, the trickle of current positive cases remained steady at under 200 this week, while the number of vaccines administered across the nuclear security enterprise continued to climb. Due to revised Department of Energy guidelines, NNSA is only reporting confirmed active cases and any additional deaths, […]

A National Academies panel said Monday that monitoring, detection and verification of nuclear weapons and fissile material should be a higher national security priority and that more government coordination is needed on the issue. That is the crux of an interim report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, published Monday. The report, […]

The U.S. Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program has awarded Lynchburg, Va.,-based BWX Technologies contracts worth about $2.2 billion for making naval reactor parts and fuel, the company said in a Tuesday morning press release. BWXT Nuclear Operations Group sites in Virginia, Ohio and Indiana will manufacture nuclear reactor components for Columbia and Virginia-class submarines over an […]

In a flurry of nominations this week, the Joe Biden administration tapped a political ecologist and university professor to head up the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. Asmeret Berhe, who’s currently a professor of soil biogeochemistry at University of California, Merced, is the administration’s pick to lead DOE’s science office, according to a Thursday […]

President Joe Biden has formally sent Jill Hruby’s nomination to be undersecretary for nuclear security at the Department of Energy to the Senate for consideration, the White House announced Thursday. Also Thursday Biden announced his intent to nominate Frank Rose as the principal deputy administrator for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). Rose is currently […]

It was not quite a year ago when Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII) reorganized its Technical Services segment to include three distinct business units.  Nuclear and Environmental Services, the unit in charge business development at Department of Energy nuclear-weapons sites, got an unambiguously DOE-styled spear tip in Michael Lempke, a former procurement honcho from the DOE’s […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration reported only 13 new confirmed, positive COVID-19 cases this week, which was well below the mean average for the last two months and, individually, one of the lowest week-to-week increases since the disease reached the U.S.  Across the semiautonomous Department of Energy agency’s nuclear security enterprise, vaccinations continued at the […]

The United Kingdom will plow ahead with its new submarine-launched warhead no matter what happens this year with the planned W93 in the U.S., and the warhead replacement program has nothing to do with the Kingdom’s recent decision to increase its warhead cap, an official with the Ministry of Defence said this week. The U.K. […]

The chair of the House Armed Services Committee quoted chapter-and-verse from his bible of nuclear weapon policies this week in a chat with the D.C.-based Reagan Institute, during which he advocated for trimming the defense budget by preventing particular crises rather than gearing up to win an all-out war. “I think that we can have […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration appointed Jason Armstrong to lead the Savannah River Field Office, the semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear-weapon steward wrote in a press release on this week. Armstrong was most recently assistant manager for nuclear safety and engineering at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Production Office in Tennessee, where he had […]