Publications: Weapons Cleanup Monitor

Anyone visiting the Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) these days should not count on finding a cheap hotel room around Carlsbad, N.M. Rooms are scarce and midweek rates can run from $148 per night at the Super 8, to $289 at the Days Inn, to $409 at the La Quinta Inns and Suites, […]

The Trump administration is proposing to shift management of cleanup of more than 20 radioactively contaminated former nuclear sites from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers back to the Department of Energy. The Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program (FUSRAP) would be placed into the portfolio of DOE’s Office of Legacy Management, accounting for nearly all […]

Demolition preparations have resumed at the X-333 Process Building at the Department of Energy’s shuttered Portsmouth Site in Ohio after a piece of old uranium-enrichment equipment caught fire there last week, an agency spokesperson confirmed Wednesday. The fire ignited at about 10:30 p.m. on March 14, after personnel with site cleanup contractor Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth cut […]

Idaho state regulators are reviewing documents drafted by Fluor Idaho, which the company hopes will allow resumption of sludge repackaging this spring at the Idaho National Laboratory facility where four waste drums overheated and ejected their lids last April. The “corrective action plan” and “evaluation of the safety of the situation” reports are being discussed […]

Daniel Santos last week resigned from the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) after a little more than four years on the job, the independent nuclear health-and-safety watchdog confirmed Monday. A spokesperson for the DNFSB said Santos’ last day will be March 29. The board had previously announced on its website, without naming names, that one […]

The H-Canyon processing facilities at the Energy Department’s Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina currently generate roughly 100,000 gallons per year of radioactive liquid waste, a figure expected to grow to about 200,000 per year in fiscal 2022. After fiscal 2022, the amount of liquid waste going from H-Canyon into the SRS liquid waste […]

By John Stang and Wayne Barber While it faces a potential 10-year ban on contracts with the Canadian government, SNC-Lavalin’s legal woes north of the border do not appear to automatically translate to similar troubles in the United States. The Montreal-based engineering and construction multinational is the parent company to Department of Energy contractor Atkins […]

The Energy Department continues to work on selecting a winning vendor to characterize, deactivate, and tear down some low-risk structures for the Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management in Tennessee. In August 2018, the Energy Department issued a request for proposals for a small business set-aside contract, potentially worth almost $25 million over five years, […]

For the second year in a row, the House of Representatives has approved legislation to reauthorize the West Valley Demonstration Project in New York. The bill, introduced by Rep. Tom Reed (R-N.Y.) and passed by voice vote March 5, is identical to the measure passed in September before Democrats retook control of the House The […]

The Department of Energy will keep the current liquid waste management vendor at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina on the job for an additional 18 months, a move that comes about two weeks after it canceled plans for a new decade-long contract. In a post on a federal procurement website, DOE said Monday […]

Columbia, S.C.-based Energy Department subcontractor AVANTech recently hired Mark Ping as its senior vice president of business development for utility services. Ping’s nuclear career spans more than 35 years and includes experience in radioactive water treatment, wet waste processing, and disposal, the company said in a Feb. 19 press release. The company is a provider […]

The Department of Energy does not know yet what action it will take on its proposed reinterpretation of the definition of high-level radioactive waste (HLW), Secretary for Environmental Management Anne Marie White said last week. “We don’t have a real distinct schedule on that. Again, we are trying to take our time and be deliberative,” […]

The Donald Trump administration has proposed a $6.5 billion budget for the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management in fiscal 2020, slightly less than the $6.6 billion requested last year but 11 percent below the $7.2 billion eventually enacted by Congress. The office’s funding for the budget year that began Oct. 1 is its largest […]

The Energy Department and its contractors expect demolition of the X-326 Process Building at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio to begin in July 2020, federal managers said March 7 at the Waste Management Symposia in Phoenix, Ariz. Most deactivation work has been completed at the building built in the 1950s to enrich uranium, first for […]

Prospective contractors have peppered the Energy Department with questions about two requests for proposals issued in February for the Hanford Site in Washington state. The DOE Office of Environmental Management recently posted 75 questions raised by the contractor community about the potential 10-year, $13 billion Tank Closure Contract. The cleanup office posted another 28 questions […]

Operations resumed Thursday at the Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico after more than a day of high winds that knocked out power and stranded some workers in an elevator for about three hours. The Carlsbad Current-Argus reported Wednesday that 36 miners were stuck in an elevator from roughly 7 p.m. to […]

The Department of Energy’s Carlsbad Field Office (CBFO) is talking with officials in Washington state about long-term plans for resuming shipments of transuranic waste from the Hanford Site to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. It has been eight years since DOE sent waste from the former plutonium production complex to the underground […]

The former management and operations contractor at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico failed to fully overcome setbacks in development of a new radioactive waste facility at the site, according to the Energy Department. In a March 1 report, DOE’s Office of Inspector General cited problems Los Alamos National Security faced with an […]

Local community leaders are urging the Washington state Department of Ecology to expedite completing an environmental impact statement (EIS) and a revised permit for Perma-Fix Northwest in Richland, Wash., near the Hanford Site. The Department of Ecology said at a public meeting Wednesday in Richland on the scope of the EIS that the permit application […]

The U.S. Department of Justice has detailed its complaints about a new Washington state law that makes it easier for Hanford Site personnel to have their workers’ compensation claims approved. The Justice Department filed a motion for summary judgment late on March 1 in U.S. District Court for Eastern Washington state, asking that the court […]

The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency in recent weeks approved the final design for a new On-Site Disposal Cell at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio. The Department of Energy received the approval within the past month or so, Joel Bradburne, deputy manager for DOE’s Portsmouth/Paducah Project Office, said Thursday on the sidelines of the Waste Management […]

The Energy Department on Wednesday issued a final request for proposals for a potential $1 billion, 10-year paramilitary security services contract at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. The current $990 million contract, held by Centerra-SRS, started in October 2009 and runs through Oct. 7. The latest DOE procurement schedule says the department could […]

PHOENIX, Ariz. – While the Department of Energy and its nuclear cleanup contractors acknowledge they are learning on the job, both sides Wednesday stressed the urgency of meeting deadlines for the first set of solicitations issued under the agency’s overhauled approach to procurement. Requests for proposals are due March 18 for two potential 10-year, multibillion-dollar […]

Operations at a key Savannah River Site waste facility are expected to increase later this year, in unison with the startup of the Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF) at the Department of Energy facility in South Carolina. Staffing increases are also expected at the SRS Saltstone Production Facility, which mixes treated salt waste with a cement […]

The Energy Department Office of Environmental Management should focus more on “breakthrough technologies” in nuclear cleanup operations of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine said this week. Such technologies could cut the time needed for environmental remediation jobs, the National Academies said in a report Monday. The DOE Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) […]

Registration opens at 9 a.m. March 19 for all of the Department of Energy’s 2019 environmental cleanup tours of the Hanford Site in Washington state. Twenty tours will be offered this year, with all bus seats expected to be claimed in a matter of hours. Registration is only available via the Hanford.gov website. However, a […]

The Department of Energy’s nuclear cleanup office should reconsider what work is deemed “operations” as opposed to “capital asset projects,” the Government Accountability Office said Tuesday. Some operations, such as treatment and storage of radioactive liquid tank waste, should be subject to the higher degree of scrutiny applied to capital projects, the government watchdog said. […]

Department of Energy contractor Fluor Idaho intends in April to resume sludge repackaging at an Idaho National Laboratory fabric filter building where four drums of radioactive waste overheated and ejected their lids about one year earlier. The company informed the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality of its plans on Feb. 28 in a monthly report […]