Publications: Weapons Cleanup Monitor

Incumbent subcontractors that worked under one Department of Energy prime contract won’t necessarily be kept on under follow-up contracts, unless they were members of a winning proposal team, a top nuclear-cleanup procurement official said this week. Some smaller companies at the Hanford Site in Washington State “were surprised” when DOE ordered new prime contractors who […]

Construction costs for a new ventilation system at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant could be up to $450 million, pending a recalculation, a Department of Energy official said Monday. The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant’s (WIPP) planned Safety Significant Confinement Ventilation System (SSCVS) “has a cost range of $400 million up to $450 million,” Janelle Armijo, […]

The Y-12 National Security Complex at the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee 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 […]

French waste and water management corporation Veolia suffered a setback last week in its attempt to take over the Suez Group, another French conglomerate in the same business. In dueling press releases Feb. 25 and Feb. 26, neither multinational corporation mentioned the effects of this takeover attempt will have on either’s North American operations, which […]

Rebutting a recent letter from Washington state and the Yakama Tribe, local officials from communities around the Hanford Site this week defended the Department of Energy’s 2019 policy change on high-level waste. In a letter dated Wednesday, mayors and other officials from Benton and Franklin Counties said they are disappointed to see the state, the […]

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management has now logged two straight weeks with confirmed, active COVID-19 cases below the 200 mark. There are 139 confirmed, active cases of COVID-19 within the nuclear cleanup complex, an Environmental Management (EM) spokesperson said by email Thursday morning. That is down from 180 cases last week and […]

Due to a shortfall in the Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning Fund, the Department of Energy is drawing upon other money in fiscal 2021 to help pay for cleanup of the government’s shuttered uranium enrichment plants. The Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning (UED&D) Fund was budgeted by Congress during the current fiscal year at $841 […]

The Department of Energy is testing Saltwaste Disposal Unit 7, a key part of the Savannah River Site’s liquid waste cleanup effort, for leaks, the agency said this week. Amentum-led contractor Savannah River Remediation is conducting what DOE described in a press release as a liquid tightness test, which involves pumping 33 million gallons of […]

After the COVID-19 pandemic struck the U.S. in 2020, Department of Energy contractor North Wind Portage actually hauled more contaminated material away from an old uranium ore processing site outside Moab, Utah, than it did during a corresponding period in 2019. That is according to data posted online by the DOE Office of Environmental Management […]

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday denied a petition to hear a challenge brought by New Mexico-based Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety over a Clean Water Act permit at the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory. The high court’s denial of certiorari, or “cert” in legal shorthand, means a decision last April by the […]

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  […]

A federal magistrate judge in Ohio will hold a preliminary pre-trial conference by telephone March 25 in a lawsuit filed in September against current and former contractors for the Department of Energy’s Portsmouth Site in Ohio. The corporate defendants in the case on Tuesday asked the judge to throw out the litigation, arguing in a […]

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management still has much work to do on oversight of contracts and operations, the Government Accountability Office said this week in its annual update on high-dollar, “high-risk” issues. The DOE’s semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration, which seemed to get a more generous review, “has continued to show leadership […]

With the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico undergoing its regular annual maintenance outage, there were only three shipments of transuranic waste to the underground salt mine during February. Two of the three shipments to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) during the month came from the Los Alamos National Laboratory […]

President Joe Biden’s nominee for deputy secretary of energy, David Turk, pledged Thursday to work with Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), over concerns a new DOE approach toward subcontractors might hurt small businesses around the Hanford Site in Washington state. “I know it is a priority for you, it will be a priority for me if […]

As of December, roughly 70% or 11.2 million of the 16 million tons of contaminated debris and soil had been hauled away from an old uranium mill outside Moab, Utah, according to data released by the Department of Energy last week in for a new contract for the project. The DOE in February released its […]

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 last decade to the Nevada National Security Site from the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee, according to minutes of an advisory committee meeting posted online. “Progress has been […]

During an earnings call this week, BWX Technologies President and CEO Rex Geveden sounded less like a boss disheartened by seeing a $13-billion contract award undone than someone eager to land a bigger payday in the near future. In December, the Department of Energy cancelled the Tank Closure Contract that a BWXT-led team won in […]

The Department of Energy plans to extend Swift & Staley’s infrastructure services contract at the Paducah Site in Kentucky for up to a year after a protest derailed plans to award the company a follow-on contract. The DOE’s Portsmouth/Paducah Project Office intends to issue a noncompetitive modification to the current contract that would potentially extend […]

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 Feb. 22, matched the DOE solicitation number for the Savannah River Site Paramilitary Security Services contract awarded Feb. 12 to the SRS […]

The Department of Energy’s legacy cleanup contractor at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico suspended some work for more than a week in January to address safety issues, according to a recent staff report to the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board. According to a board report dated Jan. 29 and posted online this […]

The Department of Energy Thursday issued a draft solicitation for a new long-term mega-contract potentially worth $26.5-billion to both oversee tank closures and run the new Waste Treatment Plant being built by Bechtel National at the Hanford Site in Washington state. In a press release announcing the new draft request for proposals (RFP), the DOE […]

It was a down earnings period for Texas-based Fluor in the 4th quarter, which the government contractor largely attributed to delayed spending due to the COVID-19 pandemic along with winding down low-profit infrastructure projects. For both the quarter and the year, the company winnowed its year-over-year losses as revenue fell, according to an earnings release […]

The Department of Energy announced Thursday on a federal procurement website that it is beginning market research for the next cleanup contract at the Paducah Site in Kentucky. The DOE Office of Environmental Management rolled out a request for information (RFI) seeking potential sources for a new deactivation and remediation agreement for the former gaseous […]

The New Mexico Environment Department asserts in a state court filing this week the Department of Energy is not meeting its cleanup obligations for the Los Alamos National Laboratory under a 2016 consent order — an order the state wants to terminate. The New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) filed its complaint Thursday with the state’s […]

Final solicitations for operations and transportation contracts at the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., could be out as soon as May, the agency said Thursday. In one of its procurement special notices, the DOE Office of Environmental Management said the final requests for proposals (RFP) will be released “no sooner […]

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management has 180 confirmed active cases of COVID-19 this week, down from 232 last week, and 296 two weeks ago, according to data a spokesperson provided Thursday. At the Savannah River Site in South Carolina there are 67 employees currently quarantined with COVID-19, according to a website run […]

Jennifer Granholm was sworn in Thursday as secretary of energy after the Senate confirmed her by a wide, bipartisan margin to lead the Department of Energy and the almost $30-billion-a-year worth of nuclear weapons and waste programs that make up more than half the agency’s budget. “DOE’s core missions — promoting scientific discovery, maintaining the […]