Publications: Weapons Cleanup Monitor

The Nevada Senate this week approved a joint resolution that would make official the state Legislature’s opposition to the Energy Department’s proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste repository. The measure, Assembly Joint Resolution 10, passed 19-2. The Nevada General Assembly approved the measure by a 32-6 vote in in March, with four lawmakers absent. The resolution now […]

The Energy Department shipped about two shipments a week of transuranic waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in April, meeting the throughput target the agency set for itself in the mine’s first month of relatively normal operations in three years. The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), near Carlsbad, N.M., reopened in January after a […]

The White House sent Texas insurance lobbyist Dan Brouillette’s nomination to be deputy secretary of energy to the Senate on Thursday, marking the Donald Trump administration’s first substantial change to DOE’s leadership since Rick Perry was sworn in as secretary of energy in March. Brouillette, said to have been handpicked for the job by Perry, […]

A freight train operated by BNSF Railway and carrying debris from the demolition of the Energy Department’s Separations Research Process Unit in upstate New York derailed on May 13 near Bosworth, Mo., though no one was hurt and no waste was spilled. A spokesperson for AECOM, prime contractor on the demolition of the 1950s-era plutonium research facility […]

Hanford Site officials were hoping for little or no wind Friday to they can lay a plastic covering over the entire length of the PUREX plant underground waste tunnel where a breach was discovered on May 9. Weather permitting, workers will stage a heavy piece of industrial plastic beside the soil berm that tops the […]

It will take until 2031 to empty and seal 16 underground waste tanks at the Energy Department’s Hanford Site near Richland, Wash. — 12 years later than the end-date DOE and Washington state set in 2010, the federal agency said late Monday in a regulatory filing. The 16 single-shell tanks to be emptied and closed are in Hanford’s […]

Five citizens groups on Wednesday sued the U.S. Interior Department over plans to build park infrastructure and services at the Energy Department’s former plutonium pit production site at the Rocky Flats Nuclear Plant in Colorado. The groups suing are: the Rocky Mountain Peace & Justice Center; Candelas Glows/Rocky Flats Glows; Rocky Flats Right To Know; […]

Nuclear remediation and waste treatment provider Perma-Fix Environmental Services on Wednesday reported improvements in both revenue and operating losses for the first quarter of 2017. The Atlanta-based company brought in $12.7 million in revenue for the three months ended on March 31, up from $10 million in the same quarter of 2017. Revenue in the […]

Most of the Hanford Site workers facing layoff this month have been placed in other positions. CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co. (CHPRC), one of the cleanup primes for the Department of Energy site in Washington state, announced in March it planned to cut up to 250 jobs in three rounds of layoffs in early May, […]

The Trump administration has taken issue with 3-year-old, bipartisan bill language the codifies the right of U.S. lawmakers to request sensitive information from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The language, a standard rider on most budget bills since 2014, was introduced that year after then-Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) objected to the NRC’s revision of its Internal […]

Earnings at engineering services firm Jacobs, a support contractor at a number of Energy Department sites, fell more than 20 percent year over year to about $50 million for the fiscal second quarter ended March 31, the company said Tuesday. Quarterly revenue rose 20 percent to about $2.8 billion, according to the company’s latest earnings […]

The emergency declared Tuesday at the Hanford Site in Washington state when a breach was discovered in one of the underground waste storage tunnels for the Plutonium Uranium Extraction (PUREX) Plant was formally ended after workers finished filling in the hole late Wednesday night. “(The work) was accomplished swiftly and safely to prevent any further […]

Nuclear Waste Partnership President Phil Breidenbach is set to depart after two years of shepherding the company’s drive to reopen the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, and the Energy Department is sending him away with a final set of good marks in the contractor's latest annual review. Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP) nabbed $11.3 million in award […]

AECOM, a near-ubiquitous presence on the Energy Department’s legacy nuclear cleanup sites, said this week that operating income at its Management Services division sank 55 percent year over year to slightly more than $50 million in the quarter ended March 31. Management Services’ earnings from joint ventures — including some of AECOM’s partnerships for DOE nuclear […]

Centrus Energy hedged the end date for decommissioning and decontaminating its shuttered industrial-scale uranium-enrichment demonstration in Ohio, saying in its latest quarterly earnings report Tuesday the project will be “substantially complete” by year’s end. In the 2017 first quarter, Centrus spent some $5.4 to decommission and decontaminate (D&D) the American Centrifuge plant at the Department of […]

The Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board will meet on June 21 to discuss the Energy Department’s research into the staying power of the borosilicate glass the agency wants to use to immobilize high-level liquid waste at the Hanford Site near Richland, Wash. The meeting will be held at the Courtyard Richland Columbia Point hotel in […]

The Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina has implemented a new initiative aimed at streamlining spent fuel operations and cutting costs in the process. Workers with Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS), the site’s management and operations provider, are making better use of the transfer bay in L Area, according to the latest […]

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 […]

Fluor Corp.’s government division got a boost from the company’s nuclear cleanup work at the Energy Department’s Idaho and Portsmouth sites in the first quarter, boosting earnings almost 70 percent to roughly $30 million on revenue of about $765 million: about a 10-percent year-over-year increase. The gains for government were “primarily due to increased contributions from […]

CH2M posted net earnings of about $14 million in the first quarter of 2017: a more than 40-percent drop from a year ago as revenue inched down about 3.5 percent to almost $1.2 billion. During the quarter, the company completed a corporate restructuring that began in the third quarter of 2016. In the period ended […]

Fluor-BWXT’s Portsmouth could wait until February 2018 to prep the X-326 uranium enrichment building for teardown, but only if it forgoes 30 percent of its award fee, according to a substantially modified contract the Energy Department released late Thursday. DOE’s Portsmouth/Paducah Project Office uploaded the modified contract, last altered May 1, to its website in […]

  The Department of Energy has not used leading practices to manage the risk of fraud and other improper payments to its contractors and subcontractors, according to a Government Accountability Office report released Monday. The report found inconsistent review of invoices, too little data for oversight, and a lack of centralized and detailed policies. “Improper […]

The Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) got an annualized budget of about $6.4 billion for fiscal 2017, some 3 percent more than last year, under the omnibus spending bill President Donald Trump signed today. The budget passed with more than half of fiscal 2017 already gone, and with only five months to write, […]

  Washington state officials were cool this week to a new government report that could point toward an alternative method for treating radioactive waste stored at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site. Grouting holds promise to effectively treat a portion of the millions of gallons of low-activity radioactive waste stored in tanks at Hanford, the […]

Workers have entered an airlock at the Hanford Site’s 324 Building for the first time in 15 years. It marks the restart of significant hands-on work to demolish the building, after careful planning and practice at a mockup facility built outside of the Department of Energy facility in Washington state. “There really is progress being […]

In a paperwork milestone that speeds but does not clear the way to start treating a potentially explosive stream of transuranic waste at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico will allow the Energy Department to use a forklift as part of the agency’s planned treatment regimen. The state approved forklift use and other elements […]

BWX Technologies on Monday reported $428.2 million in revenue for the first quarter of 2017, up by 17 percent from $364.8 million in the same quarter last year, and generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) operating income of $83.2 million, spiking 95 percent year over year from $42.6 million. Earnings per share were reported at $0.55 in […]

Bruce Covert has been appointed president of Nuclear Waste Partnership, the prime contractor for the Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, one of the contractor’s parent companies, AECOM, said Thursday. Covert will take over June 10. A nuclear-industry veteran, Covert was most recently AECOM group vice president and project director for waste […]