Publications: Weapons Cleanup Monitor

The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) is after the Energy Department for a long-overdue update on the agency’s plan to tighten emergency preparedness at active and former nuclear weapons sites. Sean Sullivan, appointed DNFSB chairman by President Donald Trump in January, made the request in a Feb. 16 letter to then-acting Energy Secretary Grace […]

Nuclear cleanup and waste treatment provider Perma-Fix Environmental Services on Wednesday reported a net loss of $13.99 million for 2016, but said the fourth quarter signaled a rebound in the business. The loss was a steep dive from a $1.9 million net loss in 2015. Net loss attributed to common stockholders also plunged from $1.1 […]

Ohio’s U.S. Senate delegation this week formally invited newly minted Energy Secretary Rick Perry to tour the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon, Ohio, where the Energy Department is weighing big changes for a uranium cleanup that could take much longer than expected. “We would like to formally invite you to Piketon, Ohio, to see […]

Months before a state regulatory deadline, the Energy Department and its prime contractor at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant have stopped using emergency above-ground waste storage space at the mine, according to a Monday regulatory filing. “On February 9, 2017, [DOE and Nuclear Waste Partnership] reconfigured the TRU [transuranic] mixed waste in storage in the […]

Cleanup of the former uranium enrichment facilities at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon, Ohio, would slide into the 2030s under a new demolition plan DOE and site remediation contractor Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth are discussing internally. According to the plan obtained by Weapons Complex Monitor, the agency and Fluor-BWXT would delay demolition of Portsmouth’s three […]

  Work is proceeding quickly to extract the last, but toughest, of the vertically buried pipes filled with waste at the 618-10 Burial Ground at the Hanford Site in Washington state. “We’re currently making good progress. We are approaching 50 percent completion with no unplanned events,” said Mike Jennings, director of the 618-10 Burial Ground […]

  Two former Hanford Site employees who said they have been diagnosed with toxic encephalopathy and other illnesses asked Washington state senators on Wednesday to revise the state’s workers’ compensation law to help sick workers from the Department of Energy facility. The state House of Representatives has already approved legislation that would lift the requirement […]

  The Energy Department is refusing to say when two outstanding cleanup contracts might be awarded at the Idaho National Laboratory site, or why the contract procurements were delayed in the first place. DOE early last year awarded its primary five-year Idaho cleanup contract — worth about $1.4 billion — to the contractor team Fluor […]

A federal judge on Monday ordered that 1 metric ton of plutonium be removed from South Carolina, but did not set a schedule for that to happen. The state sued the Department of Energy and its semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration last year, claiming they had breached a 2003 agreement to by Jan. 1, 2016, […]

The Hanford Site’s waste tank farms were placed under a stop work order from late Monday afternoon until mid-Tuesday afternoon after a worker raised concerns about beryllium safety. The work stoppage, which was called by a single union employee, covered activities requiring beryllium controls or intrusive operations in the tank farms. Any employee can halt […]

Two top Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Monday requested that Energy Secretary Rick Perry re-establish the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management (OCWRM), so that the Energy Department will again have an office dedicated solely to nuclear waste policy. Prior to its defunding in fiscal 2011, OCWRM was the DOE entity […]

The prime contractor at the Energy Department’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina illegally fired an employee in 2014 for cooperating with a congressionally led investigation into whistleblower retaliation at the site, according to DOE’s Office of Hearings and Appeals. The quasi-judicial Office of Hearings and Appeals (OHA) subsequently ordered Fluor-led Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS) […]

The Energy Department’s Cold War nuclear-cleanup budget would rise more than 5 percent in fiscal 2018 to the highest inflation-adjusted level in nearly 10 years, if a federal budget proposed Thursday by the Trump administration becomes law. The White House proposed a roughly $6.5 billion budget for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) for the budget […]

By Dennis Carr Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth (FBP) prefers to operate DOE’s Portsmouth, Ohio, site with 100 percent appropriated funds from Congress. But that has not been the reality during the last six years when up to 75 percent, currently 30 percent, of funds to support the Ohio site’s 2,000 jobs carrying out the Energy Department’s D&D […]

CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co. (CHPRC) and Mission Support Alliance expect to cut up to 300 jobs at the Hanford Site by the end of the fiscal year as two key cleanup projects near completion. CHPRC, which plans to eliminate up to 250 jobs, told workers Wednesday it expects some involuntary layoffs as part of […]

The Energy Department could soon revise an Obama administration decision that bartering government-owned uranium to pay for nuclear cleanup at the Portsmouth Site in Piketon, Ohio, does not harm the domestic uranium market, a March 9 regulatory filing shows. “The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is beginning the process to consider a new Secretarial Determination covering potential […]

Demolition has resumed on the Hanford Site’s Plutonium Finishing Plant, more than a month after a radiation spread was discovered on Jan. 27. In another key step forward toward demolishing the Department of Energy plant, external power was shut off on March 5. “It’s the first time in 60 years that the PFP Facility has […]

Eight members of Ohio’s delegation to the House of Representatives on Monday urged new Energy Secretary Rick Perry  to visit the department’s uranium enrichment decommissioning project at Portsmouth. This is the latest of several invitations Perry has received from lawmakers to take an up close and personal view of DOE’s cleanup of its Cold War nuclear complex. […]

The Tri-City Development Council (TRIDEC) in Washington state has selected an aide to Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) to serve as its vice president of federal programs. The vice president acts as a conduit between Hanford Site-area communities and the U.S. Congress and other officials in Washington, D.C., securing funding for the Department of Energy facility […]

Washington state’s two U.S. senators are urging new Energy Secretary Rick Perry to continue the efforts started by his predecessor to better protect Hanford Site workers from chemical vapors. “Nothing less than a complete commitment to safety at Hanford is acceptable,” Democrat Sens. Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray said Thursday in a letter to Perry. […]

The Environmental Protection Agency could clear the Energy Department to keep disposing of transuranic waste at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant by mid-July, according to a recent regulatory filing. Every five years, under the federal law that created the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), EPA must recertify that DOE is complying with the environmental laws governing […]

By next week, the Energy Department and Washington River Protection Solutions must let the state of Washington know if they can safely inspect the inside of the leaky double-shell tank they just emptied at the Hanford Site. On Feb. 15, DOE tank farms contractor Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS) told the Washington Department of Ecology […]

Until he joined the newly spun-off BWX Technologies in late 2015 as chief operating officer, former NASA hand Rex Geveden hadn’t had much to do with nuclear anything since supporting fast-breeder reactor research during his student days at the Argonne National Laboratory. That’s the sort of resume gap that was never likely to fly under […]

President Donald Trump on Monday signed an executive order directing federal agencies, including the Department of Energy, to eliminate “duplication and redundancy” as part of what he called a “long-overdue reorganization of our federal departments and agencies.” Trump said the cost-cutting effort would be led by Mick Mulvaney, the newly installed director of the White House […]

The Energy Department and contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership have now buried most of the radioactive waste that was stranded above ground at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant three years ago, clearing out much-needed storage space for waste shipments slated to arrive from other DOE sites next month. Since the department and its WIPP prime resumed waste […]

The Savannah River Site received additional time Monday for storage of transuranic (TRU) waste containers outside of regulated areas so the facility can better prepare to resume shipments of the material to the newly reopened Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M. The Department of Energy site requested, from the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control […]

PHOENIX — The first three sites to ship transuranic waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico will be privately operated Waste Control Specialists of Andrews, Texas, and the Department of Energy’s Idaho and Savannah River sites, a senior DOE official said here Monday. The department has not yet decided which of those […]

Idaho officials are open to the idea of lengthening the lifespan of the Energy Department’s Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project past 2018, but DOE has yet to release a report detailing what such an extension might look like. The facility, which employs about 700 workers, was built more than 15 years ago to treat and […]