Publications: Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor

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 […]

Nuclear hawks lit into Colin Kahl, President Joe Biden’s nominee for the Pentagon’s top policy post, after Kahl declined to offer unconditional support for key missile modernization programs during a Thursday hearing in the Senate Armed Services Committee. Sens. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) and Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) all tried, but all they got […]

Kim Budil took over as the 13th director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California this week. The younger of the two nuclear weapons design laboratories announced the change at top in late January. Budil replaced William Goldstein, who retired after six years as director and 36 years at Livermore. Budil takes over with […]

Karen Skelton has been named a senior adviser to Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, DOE announced this week in a press release. Skelton comes to the Joe Biden administration from California, where she spent the last decade as the CEO and founder of Skelton Strategies, a policy and political consulting firm working on energy, climate, technology  […]

Nuclear Fuel Services, Erwin, Tenn., received a long-expected $57-million contract to design and demonstrate highly enriched uranium conversion and purification for the National Nuclear Security Administration, the agency announced this week. If the BWX Technologies subsidiary’s pilot meets the agency’s goals, the company could earn a follow-on contract to perform some of the uranium work […]

Active confirmed COVID-19 cases among civilian nuclear weapons workers declined for a sixth straight week, according to the National Nuclear Security Administration’s tally of cases among its federal and contractor personnel. The semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear weapons agency had received reports of 43 new confirmed cases this week, a spokesperson said Friday, with active […]

Flight tests for the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent missile, the planned successor to the nuclear-tipped Minuteman III, are scheduled to start in fiscal year 2024, according to a Pentagon environmental review of the new weapons. The service proposes four Ground Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) flight tests from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California in fiscal […]

Germantown, Md.-based Amentum recently marked its first full year as a privately-held company after being spun off by Los Angeles-based AECOM. On Jan. 31, 2020, AEMCOM closed on the $2.4 billion sale of its AECOM Management Services division to affiliates of New York-based investment firms Lindsay Goldberg and American Securities LLC. The new owners re-christened the company […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration’s nuclear weapons assembly hub in Texas was scheduled for more or less back to normal operations this week after asking non-essential personnel to remain home for most of last week during Texas’ disastrous deep freeze. “Pantex operations are back to normal schedule today,” a spokesperson for the Bechtel National-led plant […]

The Department of Energy and the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection are hammering out some type of legal settlement over shipments of mislabeled radioactive waste sent from the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee to the Nevada National Security Site, according to minutes of an advisory committee meeting posted online. “Progress has been made on […]

U.S. nuclear modernization is nothing like Russian or Chinese nuclear modernization, Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.), chair of the subcommittee that writes the first draft of the annual military policy bill for defense-nuclear programs, said Tuesday in a hearing. “When we use the term ‘modernization’ for our nuclear weapons, that leads to the possibility of false […]

SOC, a Day & Zimmermann security company, this week protested the Department of Energy’s recently-announced award of a $1-billion Savannah River Site security services award to a Securitas-led team. The bid protest, dated Monday Feb. 22, matched the DOE solicitation number for the Security Services Contract at Savannah River awarded Feb. 12 to the SRS Critical Infrastructure […]

BWX Technologies, the Lynchburg, Va.-based nuclear contractor for the Department of Energy and the Pentagon, on Monday posted a record $557 million in revenue for the fourth quarter of 2020, up 11% from the $501 million in the 2019 period. In addition, BWXT’s net income for the fourth quarter was $65.7 million, or $0.69 per […]