Publications: Nuclear Energy & Radwaste Monitor

Two Nevada legislative panels on Saturday approved more than $7 million from 2017 to 2019 for the state to fight President Donald Trump’s plan to open the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nye County, Nev. In a joint session that was webcast, the state’s Senate Finance Committee and Assembly Ways and Means Committee approved […]

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has determined that further action is not immediately necessary to ensure safe operations of the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Massachusetts. The finding follows a supplemental inspection that ended this year following three NRC site visits to the nuclear plant. “The NRC determined that programs and processes at PNPS adequately support […]

Chicago-based power provider Exelon’s adjusted income and diluted earnings per share dipped in the first quarter, which the company capped off by completing its acquisition of the James A. FitzPatrick Nuclear Power Plant in New York state. Net income, on a non-generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) basis, fell from $632 million in first-quarter 2016 to […]

The fiscal 2017 congressional omnibus budget awaiting President Donald Trump’s signature would reduce fees and appropriations for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by about $65 million from the amount it requested more than a year ago. The funding cutback, though, would be partly alleviated by more than $20 million in unspent funds the agency is authorized […]

The head of the lobbying arm for the nuclear energy industry is urging the Trump administration to halt what she called “misleading budget tactics” by its predecessor related to the Nuclear Waste Fund. The account collected more than $20 billion from nuclear utilities over several decades, with the ultimate intent of paying for a geologic […]

The Community Engagement Panel for the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) in California will at its May 11 meeting discuss opportunities for sending the plant’s waste to other locations. The question of what to do with SONGS’ waste is already the focus of one lawsuit against the state (now in settlement talks) and much […]

The federal civil antitrust trial over the planned merger of radioactive waste management providers Waste Control Specialists and EnergySolutions was scheduled to close today in U.S. District Court for Delaware. In the two-week bench trial, the Department of Justice laid out its case why the $367 million deal would deny competitive benefits to customers for […]

There is no funding for the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada in the omnibus appropriations bill Congress passed this week to keep the Energy Department and the rest of the federal government funded through September. The bill was awaiting President Donald Trump’s signature on Friday afternoon. The Trump administration wants to restart […]

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Tuesday it has scheduled a meeting to address apparent violations of federal low-level radioactive waste transportation regulations by U.S. uranium producer Cameco Resources. The regulator said in an April 3 letter to Cameco that it is considering “escalated enforcement action” after identifying nine seeming breaches of NRC and U.S. Transportation Department […]

The state of Texas on Monday objected to Nevada’s attempt to intervene in the lawsuit demanding that the federal government move ahead with licensing and building the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. “Texas’s Petition seeks equitable remedies for decades of federal inaction on growing, above-ground stockpiles of nuclear waste. By contrast, Nevada’s intervention seeks to […]

Low-level radioactive waste disposal providers EnergySolutions and Waste Control Specialists are each other’s top rivals, and their merger would undermine competition in dozens of states, the Department of Justice said Monday in the opening day of the federal antitrust trial against the deal. The bench trial in U.S. District Court in Delaware is scheduled to last […]

A Jacobs Engineering subsidiary has secured the $350 million contract for remediation of the Parks Township, Pa., Shallow Land Disposal Area under the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program (FUSRAP), the Defense Department announced this week. The cost-plus-fixed-free contract awarded to Jacobs Field Services North America covers “development of work plans, […]

The state of Vermont is calling on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to withdraw a series of decisions allowing utility Entergy to use money from the decommissioning trust fund for the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station for management of the plant’s spent fuel. The state government has fought this battle for years, worried about draining funds […]

Environmental services provider US Ecology on Thursday reported year-over-year dips in both revenue and net income for the first quarter of 2017. Company-wide revenue for the three-month period ending March 31 slipped from $113.3 million in 2016 to $110.2 million this year, according to a company press release. US Ecology recorded $5.2 million in net […]

The Trump administration appeared to harden its resolve to open the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository over host state Nevada’s objections this week, even as word leaked that a site contractor was marshalling its workforce to restart the project and a House panel held a hearing on new pro-Yucca legislation. On Wednesday, after the hearing […]

Editor’s note: This is the final installment in a series of quarterly news summaries and analyses about President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office. In his first 100 days in office, President Donald Trump has moved from an ambiguous stance on Yucca Mountain to an impending showdown with Nevada over the seemingly imminent resumption […]

Congress on Friday passed a one-week continuing resolution that would hold the Energy Department’s nuclear cleanup budget at the fiscal 2016 level of just over $6 billion through May 5. President Donald Trump was expected to sign the bill but had not at deadline Friday for Weapons Complex Monitor. The latest bill contained no new […]

An expansive nuclear-waste bill unveiled in the House of Representatives this week would strip away some of Nevada’s legal tools for resisting the moribund Yucca Mountain geologic repository the Donald Trump administration wants to resurrect. Among many other things, the highly nuanced, 45-page Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 2017 would if signed into law curtail […]

The California Public Utilities Commission this week began eight days of evidentiary hearings on the request from Pacific Gas & Electric Co. to close the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant within a decade. The utility announced last June that it would not renew the Nuclear Regulatory Commission licenses for the plant’s two reactors when they […]

Waste Control Specialists on Tuesday requested a temporary suspension of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission review of the company’s license application for a consolidated interim spent nuclear fuel storage site in West Texas. The Dallas-based waste management provider said the licensing process currently is an “unsupportable” financial burden as it seeks to wrap up its merger with […]

The Omaha, Neb., Public Power District (OPPD) projects it will cost nearly $1.4 billion over five decades to maintain and then decommission the shuttered Fort Calhoun Station nuclear power plant, according to the utility’s newly released post-shutdown decommissioning activities report (PSDAR). The 43-year-old single-reactor facility permanently shut down last October, due to what OPPD described as […]

The contractor for cleanup of the former fast reactor research and development facility at Dounreay, Scotland, said last week it anticipates cutting up to 200 jobs over the coming year as decommissioning progresses. Dounreay Site Restoration Ltd. [DSRL] employs about 1,000 people on staff, roughly 10 to 15 percent of whom would be offered “voluntary […]

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has extended the public comment period for a license application to export 10,000 tons of radioactive material from Oak Ridge, Tenn., to Canada, after fielding concerns from a New York lawmaker. Massachusetts-based UniTech Services Group in October 2016 filed an application with the NRC to import and export the radioactive material from […]

NorthStar Group Services could wrap up decommissioning of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station by 2026. That’s according to a new post-shutdown decommissioning activities report (PSDAR), which the New York company submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission this month. The updated timeline is nearly 50 years earlier than Vermont Yankee owner Entergy had estimated in […]

In a decision drawing criticism from activists and lawmakers, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Monday granted utility Entergy permission to forgo certain post-Fukushima safety measures at the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Massachusetts. The regulator ordered a series of safety improvements at U.S. reactor sites after the 2011 triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear […]

Waste Control Specialists CEO and President Rod Baltzer is defending the prospect for shipping nuclear waste to the company’s planned interim storage site in West Texas, pointing to clean safety records and extreme tests that ensure the durability of transportation casks. Transportation has been a highly contentious topic in WCS’ proposal to build and operate a […]