Publications: Weapons Cleanup Monitor

The Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management would get $6.4 billion for fiscal 2018, and take on cleanup responsibility for three new facilities, under a DOE budget approved Thursday by the House of Representatives. The House approved the 2018 DOE budget recommendation on a highly-partisan 235-192 vote, with five Democrats voting “aye” and five Republicans […]

The Donald Trump administration is close to a mostly Republican Nuclear Regulatory Commission, but is still operating with a Democratic-leaning Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board. The White House in January began an ideological shift at both five-member groups, but the NRC, which regulates commercial nuclear power plants and civilian nuclear waste, is further along in its […]

The Los Alamos National Laboratory is still waiting on word regarding a new contract for legacy nuclear cleanup at the Department of Energy facility in New Mexico, an official said Tuesday. DOE’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) in September 2016 issued its final request for proposals for the contract, which could be worth up to […]

The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee has delayed a planned vote on whether to send three of President Donald Trump’s nominees for senior Energy Department roles to the full Senate for confirmation. The would-be DOE officials scheduled for committee votes Thursday were: Mark Wesley Menezes, a lobbyist for Berkshire Hathaway Energy tapped to be undersecretary for the Department of […]

The Energy Department on Wednesday released a request for information on a follow-up paramilitary security services contract at the Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C. Centerra LLC is the incumbent SRS security contractor. Its roughly $1 billion security services for safeguard of special nuclear material contract, awarded in 2009, expires on Oct. 7, 2019. DOE […]

Jacobs Engineering, of Dallas, is in talks to purchase Dallas-based engineering firm and DOE nuclear contractor CH2M, the U.K. Telegraph reported last week. The rumored purchase, reported Sunday by the Telegraph to be in danger of collapsing, comes as CH2M is busily seeking even more nuclear cleanup work from the Department of Energy. Spokespersons for CH2M and Jacobs did not […]

The Department of Energy would be required to establish a resource center to support ill and injured Hanford Site workers in their efforts to obtain workers’ compensation, under language added to the U.S. Senate appropriations bill covering DOE for the next fiscal year. The language, inserted by Washington state’s two Democratic senators, Patty Murray and […]

The lead liquid waste contractor at the Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C., on July 18 finished building the Saltstone Disposal Unit- (SDU) 6: the first of seven planned 30-million-plus-gallon tanks that will store radioactive salt waste left over from processing some 35 million gallons of Cold War liquid waste, the Department of Energy said […]

The Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management would get some $6.6 billion in fiscal 2018 and take on $55 million worth of new cleanup projects from active nuclear-weapon sites, under a budget bill approved Thursday by the Senate Appropriations Committee. The panel’s recommendation for the Office of Environmental Management (EM) is nearly 3 percent above the […]

The 200-foot-tall ventilation stack at the Hanford Site’s Plutonium Finishing Plant crashed to the ground Saturday in an explosive demolition. It was another step toward bringing the plant down to slab on grade by the end of September as required by the Tri-Party Agreement (TPA) covering cleanup at the former plutonium production complex in Washington […]

The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) received more shipments of transuranic waste in June than in any of the three months since it again began accepting waste from across the Energy Department’s nuclear complex, official records show. Since reopening its gates in April to waste from across the country, DOE has confirmed receipt of 31 […]

The Energy Department and its prime contractor for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant notified the New Mexico Environment Department last week that they plan to start major upgrades to the site’s ventilation system by next December. The notification was part of a recently published letter to John Kieling, chief of the New Mexico Environment Department’s Hazardous Waste […]

WASHINGTON — A Senate committee convened here Thursday to consider three of President Donald Trump nominees for senior Energy Department jobs The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee will mull the testimony of the three DOE nominees and, in a business meeting that had not been scheduled at press time for Weapons Complex Monitor,  vote on […]

Contractors from CTI and Associates Inc. are finishing the final paperwork on a demolished switchyard at the old Oak Ridge Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Tennessee. Last week, CTI hauled the last pieces of the switchyard away from the site, now called the East Tennessee Technology Park. Constructed in 1944, the 4-acre K-732 switchyard was one […]

The Department of Energy is evaluating multiple options for stabilizing the second radioactive waste storage tunnel for the PUREX facility at the Hanford Site, as an Aug. 1 deadline nears. The Washington state Department of Ecology set the deadline for DOE to present a draft plan for stabilizing the second tunnel after the other PUREX […]

The University of Arkansas hopes Congress will soon come through with the last $10.1 million needed to complete cleanup of the long-disused Southwest Experimental Fast Oxide Reactor (SEFOR) facility. The university aims in October to begin the third and final phase of the nearly decade-long remediation program, which would involve removing the plant reactor and […]

A former employee who filed a discrimination lawsuit against the Savannah River Site’s liquid waste management provider must respond to the contractor’s motion for dismissal by July 28, or the case will be thrown out. A federal judge set the deadline after attorneys for Jimmy Rouse missed an earlier response date this month. In a lawsuit filed […]

A major waste treatment facility at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina was placed in deliberate operations last month following multiple safety-related incidents in recent months. The Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF) entered into deliberate operations – a reduced work phase in which personnel pay extra attention to detail and planning when conducting […]

The Energy Department would get no money to turn Yucca Mountain in Nye County, Nev., into a permanent nuclear-waste disposal site under a roughly $30-billion agency budget the Senate Appropriations Committee approved Thursday. The committee signaled its intention in draft legislation that leaked earlier in the week before appropriators released the language of their bill and […]

The Energy Department and its prime contractor for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant notified the New Mexico Environment Department last week that they plan to start major upgrades to the site’s ventilation system by next December. The notification was part of a recently published letter to John Kieling, chief of the New Mexico Environment Department’s Hazardous Waste […]

The House of Representatives’ fiscal 2018 energy funding bill directs the National Nuclear Security Administration to address various legal and diplomatic hurdles in its proposed alternative plutonium disposition method before Congress considers funding the new approach and abandoning the MOX Fuel Fabrication Facility under construction in South Carolina. The House version of the energy and […]

Thermal imaging scans were being collected over 20 square miles at the center of the Hanford Site this week to help determine where radioactive waste might be buried. A crew using a small airplane started the flights early Wednesday morning and expected to continue over early mornings for three to five days. Information is being […]

The public meeting promised by the Department of Energy on the structural integrity of the Hanford Site’s PUREX Tunnel No. 2 has been set for 6 p.m. July 20., at the Courtyard by Marriott, 480 Columbia Point Drive in Richland, Wash. The workshop will be webcast. Registration information can be found here. DOE and the Washington […]

CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co. and the Washington state Department of Ecology have reached a settlement agreement over waste storage that waives a $50,000 penalty against the Hanford Site cleanup contractor. The state had accused CH2M in August 2016 of breaching requirements for the storage of five containers of waste at Hanford’s T Plant, including identifying […]

The White House is considering Alan Parker, who now leads one of the Energy Department’s nuclear-cleanup contractors, to head the agency’s entire remediation of its Cold War legacy as assistant secretary of energy for environmental management (EM), a source said Thursday. Parker is currently president and project manager for Mid-America Conversion Services: a new Atkins-led contracting […]

Mark Gilbertson has replaced Frank Marcinowski as the top policy and regulatory affairs official in the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management (EM), according to official agency correspondence reviewed by Weapons Complex Monitor. A DOE spokesperson in Washington confirmed Wednesday that Gilbertson is EM’s current acting associate principal deputy assistant secretary for regulatory and […]

The remaining portions of the site that once housed the old Oak Ridge Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Tennessee will be fully remediated within three years, well ahead of the original schedule, according to Ken Rueter, president of Energy Department site cleanup contractor URS-CH2M Oak Ridge (UCOR). The last Manhattan Project-era uranium enrichment building, K-27, came […]

House lawmakers this week approved a fiscal 2018 energy and water budget that would give the the Department of Energy about $30 billion and add three new cleanup projects to DOE’s Office of Environmental Management. The House Appropriations Committee agreed by voice vote Wednesday, with a few Democrat dissenters, to send the nearly $38 billion 2018 […]