Publications: Weapons Cleanup Monitor

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, […]

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 […]