Publications: Weapons Cleanup Monitor

The Savannah River Site declared a potential inadequacy in the safety analysis (PISA) at a site storage facility on Feb. 24 after a lid came off a spent nuclear fuel (SNF) storage can. Department of Energy SRS Manager Jack Craig said in a March 29 report that the incident occurred in L Area, a facility […]

The president of the Hanford Atomic Metal Trades Council (HAMTC) is resigning, but says he plans to remain involved at the Hanford Site, focusing on health and safety training. Dave Molnaa will on April 16 leave the job he has held for 12 years at HAMTC, an umbrella group for 15 unions representing workers at […]

The chairman of a House panel with jurisdiction over the Energy Department met with Energy Secretary Rick Perry on Wednesday, less than a week after requesting an investigation into whether DOE’s Office of Environmental Management is spending money efficiently. Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), who holds the gavel on the House Energy and Commerce energy subcommittee, was […]

Portage Inc. earned $1.1 million of its possible $1.5 million fiscal 2016 award fee as the prime contractor for the Department of Energy’s Moab Uranium Mill Tailings Remedial Action (UMTRA) contract. It received a “good” rating for the year, according to DOE’s latest evaluation, reflecting that grade in three performance areas: project management; tailings excavation, […]

The next technical services contract at the Energy Department’s Portsmouth/Paducah Project Office in Lexington, Ky., is a five-year deal, including options, that has been set aside for eligible small-businesses, according to the draft solicitation the agency released recently. The contract is a follow-on to the roughly $50-million Portsmouth Environmental Technical Services contract held by Restoration […]

President Donald Trump’s choice for deputy energy secretary, former DOE and Capitol Hill hand and current lobbyist Dan Brouillette, is said to have been handpicked by new Energy Secretary Rick Perry. Trump gave formal notice that he intends to nominate Bouillette in a statement posted online Tuesday. The nomination had not been sent to the U.S. Senate […]

The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) could next week accept its first shipment of transuranic waste from an Energy Department nuclear cleanup site in more than three years, a source in New Mexico said this week. DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office projected in January that WIPP would begin taking in new shipments this month, though the agency […]

A story in the March 24 issue of Weapons Complex Monitor (“DOE Office Says SRNS Retaliated Against Whistleblower,” Vol. 28, No. 12) should have said a new DOE rule intended to tighten protections for whisteblowers at contractors went into effect March 21.

The Department of Energy has applied for a 20-year renewal of the license for storage in Idaho of debris from the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, according to documents made public Tuesday. The regulator issued the license for Three Mile Island Unit 2 (TMI-2) Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installation (ISFSI) on March 19, 1999. […]

Nearly a year after he made it, the Energy Department shot down a request from the mayor of Piketon, Ohio, to fund a third-party review of thousands of pages of documents that informed the agency’s decision to dispose of waste from uranium-enrichment cleanup at the Portsmouth Site at the facility. Piketon Mayor Billy Spencer lodged […]

  Legislation that would have made Hanford Site workers more likely to be awarded workers’ compensation has failed to pass out of a Washington state Senate committee. The deadline passed Wednesday for Senate committees to send House policy bills to the full Senate, under the Washington state Legislature’s 2017 session “cutoff calendar.” The state Senate […]

  Repairs of a key waste processing facility at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site remain on schedule for completion in 2017, but the work is taking a toll on short-term efforts to rid the facility of radioactive waste, officials reaffirmed Monday. In the interim, there is no liquid waste processing going on at […]

The White House’s proposed budget cuts for the Environmental Protection Agency would dramatically delay the end of nuclear cleanup at the Hanford Site, the head of Washington state’s nuclear cleanup oversight program told lawmakers Wednesday in a Capitol Hill hearing. Hanford has “historically stood out for the slow pace of cleanup,” and the pace would […]

Westinghouse Electric Co., the U.S. nuclear arm of financially imploding Japanese conglomerate Toshiba, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Wednesday, raising questions about the storied company’s staying-power in the nuclear decommissioning business even as it pledged continuity of operations during the reorganization. “We are focused on developing a plan of reorganization to emerge from Chapter 11 […]

HPM Corp., the Hanford occupational medical services provider at Hanford, earned 91.7 percent of the fee available in fiscal 2016, according to a notification it received from the Department of Energy last week. It earned $302,610 of the $330,000 available, according to a summary prepared by DOE. The evaluation showed a small improvement over the […]

With more of President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office gone than remaining, the Energy Department’s Cold War cleanup contractors find themselves — comfortably for now — in the eye of a political storm, shepherded through a prolonged lack of permanent agency leadership by veteran DOE managers. It has been almost a month since […]

  The Hanford Site’s infamous McCluskey Room, the site of the 1976 explosion that injured worker Harold McCluskey, has been demolished. CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co. workers finished the project Wednesday, making it the first section of the Plutonium Finishing Plant (PFP) to be taken down to slab on grade. “Completing demolition on this building […]

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is still reviewing Centrus Energy Corp.’s plans to ship radioactive waste from the canceled American Centrifuge plant in Piketon, Ohio, to the Energy Department’s Nevada National Security Site, throwing a wrench into the company’s plan to start moving waste by the end of March. Centrus has also managed to lop a […]

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 […]