Publications: Weapons Cleanup Monitor

The Trump administration appeared to harden its resolve to open the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository over host state Nevada’s objections this week, even as word leaked that a site contractor was marshalling its workforce to restart the project and a House panel held a hearing on new pro-Yucca legislation. On Wednesday, after the hearing […]

Editor’s note: This is the final installment in a series of quarterly news summaries and analyses about President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office. What has DOE’s Cold War nuclear cleanup program gotten out of President Donald Trump’s White House so far? At 100 days in, the tally stands at one new secretary of […]

Local authorities have charged three men with illegally entering an area of the Hanford Site closed to the public to gather antlers shed by deer and elk. One of the men, Daniel Briant Charboneau, 32, of Pasco, was an employee of Hanford tank farm contractor Washington River Protection Solutions at the time of the alleged […]

Congress on Friday passed a one-week continuing resolution that would hold the Energy Department’s nuclear cleanup budget at the fiscal 2016 level of just over $6 billion through May 5. President Donald Trump was expected to sign the bill but had not at deadline Friday for Weapons Complex Monitor. The latest bill contained no new […]

Liquid waste workers are filling another of the Savannah River Site’s disposal units with decontaminated salt solution. Savannah River Remediation (SRR), the liquid waste contractor at the Department of Energy site in South Carolina, is filling Saltstone Disposal Unit (SDU) 3A, according to a Facebook post Tuesday. Work began in February. SDUs are cylindrical concrete […]

Environmental services provider US Ecology on Thursday reported year-over-year dips in both revenue and net income for the first quarter of 2017. Company-wide revenue for the three-month period ending March 31 slipped from $113.3 million in 2016 to $110.2 million this year, according to a company press release. US Ecology recorded $5.2 million in net […]

Savannah River Remediation will remain the prime liquid waste managment contractor at the Savannah River Site through Dec. 31 under a six-month contract extension the Energy Department announced Thursday. DOE did not disclose the value of the modification in Thursday’s press release. The agency is in the middle of a competition for the next big liquid […]

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said this week it would begin its technical review of the Energy Department’s application for a 20-year extension of its license to store Three Mile Island nuclear power plant debris in Idaho. Renewal would push back the expiration date for the Three Mile Island Unit 2 (TMI-2) Independent Spent Fuel Storage […]

The Energy Department and its contractor at the Los Alamos National Laboratory might not clean up the stream of waste that leaked radiation into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant three years ago until May due to lingering concerns about the facility in which the waste will be treated. The local Santa Fe New Mexican, citing a […]

The book would close on a whistleblower lawsuit that Bechtel National and AECOM settled last year for $125 million, under a final stipulation for dismissal the three plaintiffs filed Tuesday. The filing is mostly a formality, as the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Washington state had already dismissed much of the case […]

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is still reviewing Centrus Energy Corp.’s plan for decommissioning an industrial-scale uranium enrichment demonstration in Piketon, Ohio, an official said Monday. Centrus sent NRC its plan for dismantling the 1-square-mile American Centrifuge plant at the Energy Department’s Portsmouth site March 1, but the document “has not yet been approved,” Marvin Sykes, […]

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission will meet virtually with Centrus Energy Corp. April 24 to discuss the results of a year’s worth of oversight at the now-defunct American Centrifuge uranium enrichment demonstration in Ohio. The Energy Department in 2015 canceled the industrial-scale uranium enrichment demonstration at the Portsmouth Site near Piketon, Ohio. The NRC, which regulates the […]

An expansive nuclear-waste bill unveiled in the House of Representatives this week would strip away some of Nevada’s legal tools for resisting the moribund Yucca Mountain geologic repository the Donald Trump administration wants to resurrect. Among many other things, the highly nuanced, 45-page Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 2017 would if signed into law curtail […]

Crews should within a couple weeks begin demolition of the most contaminated portion of the Hanford Site’s most hazardous building, the Plutonium Finishing Plant. Tom Teynor, Department of Energy manager for the Plutonium Finishing Plant (PFP), provided the update on the highly contaminated canyon of the plant’s Plutonium Reclamation Facility on Tuesday at a committee […]

Nearly 5 miles of water lines at the Hanford Site have been replaced, ending both the need for frequent emergency repairs and the potential for contamination to spread deeper in the soil when aging water lines broke or leaked. The recently completed project cost about $3 million, including revegetation and related work, according to Mission […]

  Plaintiffs and defendants met with a mediator for a first session Thursday to attempt to resolve a lawsuit demanding better protection for Hanford Site workers exposed to chemical vapors from waste tanks, according to Hanford tank farm contractor Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS). The session, held in Seattle, was expected to continue today. Washington […]

Monica Regalbuto, the Energy Department’s nuclear-cleanup chief during the last two years of the Barack Obama administration, will be the commencement speaker for this year’s graduation ceremony at the University of South Carolina Aiken on May 3. The ceremony will take place at the USC Aiken Convocation Center, about 30 miles by road from the […]

The Energy Department’s Office of Enterprise Assessments (EA) is investigating Bechtel National, prime contractor for the Waste Treatment Plant at the Hanford Site in Washington state, over a worker injury in November. The office did not describe the details or circumstances of the injury, except to say it occurred “during preparation of a plant cooling […]

The Energy Department should cease funding cleanup of the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Ohio with bartered uranium, a Washington-based trade group for the nuclear power industry said last week. Further funding for cleanup of DOE facilities should be provided fully through congressional appropriations, so as not to disrupt uranium markets, Nuclear Energy Institute Fuel Cycle Programs Director […]

The Energy Department’s inspector general said Tuesday a Hanford Site contractor appears on track to start removing 27 cubic meters of radioactive sludge from a building near the Columbia River by October 2018, but dinged the company for masking cost overruns with dodgy accounting. CH2M Plateau Remediation Co. “appears to be on schedule to meet […]

EnergySolutions, of Salt Lake City, will clean up and package radioactive waste from the canceled American Centrifuge uranium enrichment demonstration in Piketon, Ohio, according to a document published by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The work will be done for Centrus Energy Corp., which was the Energy Department’s prime contractor on the American Centrifuge demo at […]

The Energy Department on Wednesday had planned to start treating the troublesome stream of transuranic waste at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) that leaked radiation into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant three years ago, but the day came and went without any confirmation that DOE and its contractor had begun the work. An agency spokesperson […]

The executive board of the Hanford Atomic Metal Trades Council (HAMTC) has picked an officer from Local 427 of the International Brotherhood of Painters and Allied Trades as the next president of the umbrella group for 15 Hanford Site unions. Jeff McDaniel took over as president at the HAMTC meeting Wednesday after Dave Molnaa, who […]

  The Hanford Site is developing an acquisitions strategy as it eyes the expiration of major cleanup contracts in the next couple years, officials said Wednesday at the “Hanford Live” virtual question-and-answer session. Department of Energy officials had expected to release a comprehensive contracting strategy for Hanford in January and to issue draft requests for […]

For the first time in three years, the Energy Department has sent shipments of transuranic waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico for permanent disposal. Shipments from separate DOE facilities either arrived at WIPP or departed for it this week. One shipment arrived early Monday from the Idaho National Laboratory, while another […]

One, and only one, of Nevada’s U.S. senators on Thursday asked the Senate Appropriations Committee not to include any funding for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in the stopgap spending bill Congress must produce this month to keep the federal government funded through September. “As you finalize legislation to continue funding for the Fiscal […]

Waste Control Specialists will retain custody of transuranic waste generated at the Los Alamos National Laboratory under a recently extended contract with Nuclear Waste Partnership: the Energy Department’s prime contractor for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. A DOE spokesperson confirmed the contract status Wednesday, but the agency declined to discuss the terms of […]