Publications: Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor

As vaccine rollouts continue, confirmed, active cases of COVID-19 across the National Nuclear Security Administration complex dropped to their lowest reported level since mid-October. In December, The semi-autonomous Department of Energy nuclear weapons agency was reporting around 1,000 active cases a week.  As of Friday, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) had 56 new confirmed […]

The Department of Energy’s Carlsbad Field Office in New Mexico has halted transuranic waste shipments to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant from the National Nuclear Security Administration’s contractor for the Los Alamos National Laboratory after sparks from a waste drum prompted evacuations at both the lab and the disposal site. That is according to a […]

David Turk was sworn in this week as the deputy secretary of energy after clearing the Senate with only two Republicans in opposition. Turk took the oath, administered by his boss, Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, on Thursday. The full Senate approved his nomination Wednesday 98-2, with only Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Rand Paul […]

Weeks after Republican nuke hawks panned his performance at a nomination hearing, the Senate Armed Services Committee this week voted 13-13, along party lines, to advance Colin Kahl’s nomination for the Pentagon’s top policy job. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) will now have to make a motion to discharge Kahl’s nomination to bring a […]

A former director of the Sandia National Laboratories has floated toward the top of the Joe Biden administration’s list of candidates to lead the National Nuclear Security Administration and its roughly $20-billion-a-year civilian nuclear weapons program, according to a source familiar with the administration’s thinking. Jill Hruby led Sandia for about two years in the […]

Secretary of State Anthony Blinken this week said that the U.S. and its allies must strengthen their militaries, improve readiness and maintain an effective nuclear deterrent as part of efforts to modernize alliances and respond to changing threats, China and Russia. U.S. nuclear forces, Blinken told an audience at NATO headquarters in Belgium, must be […]

Nuclear weapons are one of a trilogy of high-spend programs likely to affect defense budgeting decisions for years, the chair of a House Appropriations panel said this week in an online hearing. “Cyber security, nuclear modernization and overseas contingency operations funding sound like they’re three unrelated topics,” Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.), chair of the House […]

A COVID-19 fatality at the Sandia National Laboratories brought the confirmed count of fatal cases across the National Nuclear Security Administration complex to 16 during the ongoing pandemic, as the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory at last got a delivery of vaccines. This was the second confirmed fatal case at Sandia, a spokesperson at the National […]

Centrus Energy Corp. this month finished building all 16 of the AC100M gas centrifuges it plans to use to produce high-energy reactor fuel for the Department of Energy at the Portsmouth Site near Piketon, Ohio, under a $115 million DOE contract from 2019. That’s according to a press release from the Bethesda, Md.-based company, which […]

The U.S. Senate Monday voted 51-to-40 to confirm Rep. Debra Haaland (D-N.M.) as secretary of interior, which will create a vacancy in the congressional district that includes the Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories facilities in Albuquerque. An Associated Press article Tuesday in the San Antonio Express-News reported Tuesday former State Land Commissioner Aubrey Dunn […]

A Pentagon official pulled out of a scheduled public briefing about plutonium pit production at the Savannah River Site this week because of a gag order imposed by a Biden Administration review, a group advising the South Carolina government on nuclear matters said. Drew Walter, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear matters, was […]

It can happen on submarines, it can happen in the mail and it can happen if you fly a lot: a dose big enough to keep you out of radiological areas for a while. At the Pantex Plant earlier this year, it happened because someone left their dosimeter near a linear accelerator. That’s according to […]

Jim Bittner is taking over as vice president and general manager for BWX Technologies’ Nuclear Operations Groups’ Lynchburg, Va., manufacturing facility, which manufactures reactors for naval aircraft carriers and submarines, the company announced Monday. Bittner will be in charge of about 2,200 employees in Lynchburg, which is one of the two commercial facilities certified by the Nuclear […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration has logged about 60 new COVID-19 cases a week, give or take, over the last month, which marks the third since multiple major nuclear weapons sites started vaccinations on premises. Since January, when most major civilian nuclear weapon sites started administering vaccines inside the fence, confirmed COVID transmission rates at […]

Changing requirements and the COVID-19 pandemic mean the National Nuclear Security Administration will wait until fiscal year 2023 to begin producing high-purity depleted uranium metal for nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy’s Portsmouth Site near Piketon, Ohio. The semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear weapon steward previously wanted to get its depleted uranium tetrafluoride (DUF4) […]

The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant could go offline for a major ventilation upgrade right around the time the Los Alamos National Laboratory starts casting new nuclear weapon cores and generating a slew of new defense transuranic waste, a lab official said Wednesday at the online Waste Management Symposia conference. “As we progress in our nuclear […]

Paul Kreitz, who has helped manage planning and construction of pit production infrastructure at the Los Alamos National Laboratory for the past two years or so, is leaving lab manager Triad National Security in late April, a lab official said this week. Kreitz was not one of Triad National Security’s key personnel. Before Los Alamos, […]

Oak Ridge, Tenn.-based RSI Services is the winner of a potential five-year, $22-million small business contract to remediate Naval Reactors sites overseen by the semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration in West Milton, N.Y. The set-aside cleanup contract for the Kesselring Site was announced Tuesday by the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management. Under the […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration this week formalized a decision to immobilize some 350 kilograms of plutonium used in a Japanese research facility into glass-like cylinders at the Savannah River Site rather than sending the material to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. The semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear weapons agency put the official stamp on […]

Best known as a military shipbuilder, Huntington Ingalls Industries has been part of the Department of Energy’s weapons complex since 2008 and hopes to expand its foothold in the sector, the president of the company’s nuclear and environmental services group said Thursday. The parent of Newport News Nuclear also has an “aspirational” interest in breaking […]

The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee unanimously approved David Turk to be deputy secretary of energy in a roll call vote Thursday, clearing the way for the full Senate to confirm the former Biden staffer and Obama administration official for the agency’s No. 2 job. The Senate had not scheduled a confirmation vote for […]

The Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., could soon be approved to resume waste shipments to the Nevada National Security Site, Nevada’s federal site manager said Thursday at an online conference. The Y-12 certification was lifted following a 2019 disclosure that dozens of mislabeled containers of waste were sent to Nevada between 2013 […]

One year after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, more than 5,000 civilian nuclear-weapons workers had caught the viral disease, including 15 who died from it, according to the latest official count from the National Nuclear Security Administration. The semiautonomous Department of Energy weapons agency counted 5,106 confirmed cases at deadline Friday for […]

The Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar Unit 2 reactor, which began producing tritium for nuclear weapons on Nov. 19, will irradiate a bit more than half as many tritium-producing rods as hoped in fiscal year 2021, the National Nuclear Security Administration said this week. The semi-autonomous Department of Energy nuclear-weapons agency had aimed to irradiate […]

The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration has improved oversight of contracts and operations since last year, but the semi-autonomous nuclear weapons agency could stand to do more, the Government Accountability Office said this week in its annual update on high-dollar, “high-risk” issues. The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) “has continued to show leadership […]

Progressive lawmakers Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) this week urged  President Joe Biden to scale back nuclear modernization efforts, including pausing development of the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent program and canceling new and planned low-yield weapons. In a letter sent Tuesday to Biden, Markey and Khanna raised concerns on the “unsustainable rate of […]