Publications: Weapons Cleanup Monitor

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 […]

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 […]