Publications: Weapons Cleanup Monitor

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is in the final steps of an environmental assessment that would clear the way for Centrus Energy Corp. to start shipping radioactive debris out of a shuttered, next-generation uranium-enrichment demonstration in Piketon, Ohio, an NRC spokesperson said Tuesday. NRC “is currently working on an Environmental Assessment of the environmental impacts of transporting […]

Jeff Kerridge was appointed senior vice president of business development for AECOM’s Nuclear and Environment business unit, the company announced late Tuesday. Kerridge is responsible for “implementing strategies to build the N&E business [and] have responsibility for assuring quality and consistency in business development pursuits,” Los Angeles-based AECOM wrote in a press release. Kerridge was […]

James Voss will step down as managing director of Waste Management Symposia at the end of June. The organization helms the annual Waste Management Symposium, which is widely considered a must-attend show among nuclear-cleanup experts in industry and government. Voss broke the news late Tuesday in a widely distributed email. The text of that email […]

The Donald Trump administration requested $150 million for 2018 across the Energy Department and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to restart DOE’s application to license Yucca Mountain in Nye County, Nev., as a nuclear waste repository. The $120 million of funding within DOE encompasses $110 million for Yucca licensing and $10 million for an interim storage […]

The manager in charge of the effort to fix a Savannah River Site evaporator pot that unexpectedly sprung a leak halfway through its 30-year design life is 95-percent sure the vessel will be up and running again by Dec. 31. The 3H Evaporator Pot, which last year leaked some 3,000 gallons of highly radioactive liquid waste, is […]

The Department of Energy’s latest budget request would reduce spending at the Hanford Site in Washington state by $118.8 from current levels. The total budget would be $2.22 billion for fiscal 2018, not including security costs. The proposal would add about $5 million to the budget of Hanford’s Office of River Protection, for a total […]

The Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site is in line to receive $1.45 billion in fiscal 2018 for its environmental management (EM) mission, much of which would fund liquid waste cleanup, according to President Donald Trump’s budget proposal this week. The request is $111 million more than the South Carolina site received for EM work […]

Radioactive contamination at the Hanford Site’s double-shell Tank AZ-101 does not appear to be from a leak within the tank, the Department of Energy said Wednesday. A leak was considered possible when a robotic crawler pulled out of the annulus, or space between the tank’s two shells, on May 18 was found to be contaminated […]

A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers on Wednesday asked the Government Accountability Office to review monitoring and maintenance of aging facilities at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state after the May 9 discovery of a breached waste tunnel. “Fortunately, the collapse did not result in any injuries and no measureable release of […]

Savannah River Site security has been given direction to take appropriate action if a drone flying above the site presents a threat, an official at the South Carolina facility told a local advisory board on Monday. “Protocols are in place for engagement and I don’t really want to say anything else about that,” according to […]

Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) this week told the head of the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management that President Donald Trump did not propose a large enough 2018 budget for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP). WIPP, the nation’s only deep-underground disposal facility for the radioactively contaminated material and equipment known as transuranic waste, would […]

The Department of Energy has rated the fiscal 2016 performance of Hanford Site support services provider Mission Support Alliance (MSA) as “very good.” The contractor earned 91 percent of the available fee, or a little more than $19.2 million. The fee included 94 percent of the maximum available for meeting milestones, or nearly $13 million, […]

The $88 million top-line increase the Donald Trump administration proposed Tuesday for the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management in fiscal 2018 is two-and-a-half times less than the office would spend next year to start decontaminating disused nuclear-weapon facilities now owned by DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The administration’s new budget plan, if […]

The Donald Trump administration’s fiscal 2018 budget proposal sustains its predecessor’s plan to terminate the Department of Energy’s Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility in South Carolina. The National Nuclear Security Administration’s $13.9 billion budget proposal includes $1.8 billion for the defense nuclear nonproliferation account, of which $279 million would go toward nonproliferation construction – a […]

The Energy Department said Thursday it has awarded Four Rivers Nuclear Partnership — a CH2M-led team that also includes Fluor Corp. and BWX Technologies — a contract worth about $1.5 billion over 10 years, including options, to deactivate and remediate the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant near Paducah, Ky. DOE received four bids for the work, according […]

The U.S. Civilian Board of Contract Appeals on May 12 dismissed an appeal filed by the management and operations contractor of the Energy Department’s Savannah River Site over a dispute on the allowability of certain contract costs. In 2013, a DOE contracting officer “disallowed” $1.3 million paid to Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS) under the […]

Workers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory on Wednesday morning sent the first barrel of potentially explosive nitrate-salt waste to the building where it will be cleaned up and prepared for eventual disposal at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, a source in New Mexico said. Stephen Hoffman, deputy manager of the agency’s Environmental Management Los […]

The Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management would get about $6.5 billion for fiscal 2018, including a small increase for the agency’s major closure sites and a small overall decrease for uranium-enrichment cleanups, according to a leaked document a Washington, D.C.-based think tank said contains the White House’s upcoming budget request. The spreadsheet was released […]

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, […]