Publications: Weapons Cleanup Monitor

The U.S. senators from Washington state are calling on the Department of Energy’s inspector general to assess the safety environment at the Hanford, including investigating its third-party administrator for workers’ compensation claims. The request comes after DOE notified the administrator, Penser North America, that it would end its contract without exercising all options for extensions. […]

  Hanford Site workers next week will switch to some highly limited use of air purifying respirators in place of supplied air respirators at the Department of Energy facility’s waste storage tank farms. A joint statement Thursday informed workers that starting March 14 some entries into the AP Tank Farm would involve use of air-purified […]

Fluor’s chief operating officer is retiring at the end of this month, followed by the company’s chief financial officer before the year is over, the Texas-based Department of Energy contractor announced Wednesday. COO Peter Oosterveer has been with Fluor for 28 years in a number of positions, including as head of the company’s energy and chemicals […]

  PHOENIX — The Los Alamos National Laboratory expects next month to begin treating 60 drums that contain a combustible mix of nitrate salts and kitty litter like the one that burst open and released a small amount of radiation into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in 2014, officials said here Monday. The incident closed the transuranic […]

The Washington state House of Representatives last week voted 69-29 in favor of legislation that would make Hanford Site personnel more likely to be awarded workers’ compensation, but not before making a significant change to the bill. The state Senate now has its turn to consider Substitute House Bill 1723. The bill, modeled after a […]

PHOENIX — A facility needed to treat low-activity liquid waste at the Energy Department’s Hanford Site in Washington state will not be built until 2021 — the year before contractor Bechtel National must either prove its Waste Treatment Plant (WTP) is ready to treat low-activity waste, or forfeit more than $150 million in fees, according to […]

Three Democratic Senators on Monday asked newly minted Energy Secretary Rick Perry to instate new whistleblower protections at the agency that the Trump administration delayed as part of a government-wide regulatory freeze. The whistleblower protection was part of a rule published in the waning days of Barack Obama’s administration that clarified DOE may assess civil penalties against contractors that […]

Yearly operating profit at CH2M’s Environment and Nuclear business rose 7 percent year over year to $83 million in an otherwise-tough 2016, the Englewood, Colo.-based engineering company reported this week. Gross revenue in the segment, which includes the company’s Cold War cleanup work with the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management, was just over $2 billion: up […]

Editor’s note: This is the third in a series of quarterly news summaries and analyses about President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office. We’ll check in with one long, big-picture update every 25 days, with a regular flow of updates in between to keep you up on news affecting U.S. nuclear cleanup during the […]

By Billy Spencer, Mayor, Piketon, Ohio. Scioto County Commissioner Mike Crabtree is misinformed with respect to the Village of Piketon’s long-held position on the cleanup and redevelopment plan for the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant (PORTS) and the need for a third-party independent assessment. He should also know that the Village of Piketon is not alone […]

Demolition of the Hanford Site’s Plutonium Finishing Plant might stretch beyond a Sept. 30 regulatory deadline, the manager of the Energy Department’s Richland Operations Office told a citizens group Wednesday. While there is a “high probability we can get it done by the end of this year,” the project might only be “near-done by the […]

Revenue at the BWX Technologies business focused on the Energy Department’s Cold War cleanup program rose more than 15 percent last year as part of a generally strong 2016, the company reported Monday. The Lynchburg, Va., company derives the preponderance of its revenue from its sole-source nuclear propulsion work for the U.S. Navy and reports […]

Uranium sequestration operations near the Columbia River in the Hanford Site’s 300 Area are expanding after a successful test project. Soil had earlier been excavated in places down to a depth of 15 feet in the 300 Area to remove most of the uranium that has put the groundwater at risk of contamination. The hope […]

The Savannah River Site is on pace to meet its fiscal 2017 goal to double-stack and safely store 200 canisters of treated radioactive waste, according to a site official. In October, liquid waste contractor Savannah River Remediation (SRR) began stacking canisters of vitrified waste on top of each other in Glass Waste Storage Building 1 […]

The White House will pitch a big increase for defense spending in fiscal 2018, while other parts of the federal government will have to “do more with less,” President Donald Trump said Monday. “This defense spending increase will be offset and paid for by finding greater savings and efficiencies across the federal government,” Trump said […]

While the Energy Department still has not said which of its cleanup sites will first send waste to the reopened Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, recent correspondence between the New Mexico Environment Department and the agency shows DOE has made headway in approving shipments from three of the five sites on its shortlist. In a Feb. […]

Officials and employees on Thursday celebrated retrieving all 65,000 cubic meters of transuranic waste that was buried under a dirt berm at the Department of Energy’s Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project in Idaho. Idaho Gov. C.L. “Butch” Otter and Attorney General Lawrence Wasden attended the event, which honored AMWTP personnel whose job for the past 14 years […]

French nuclear giant AREVA, in the middle of a massive restructuring, said Wednesday it stemmed its corporate losses in 2016 and returned the segment of its business dealing with nuclear cleanup to operational profitability during the year. Overall, the company’s 2016 loss was just under $700 million, a 66-percent improvement compared with 2015’s multibillion loss. Last year, […]

The Senate on Thursday confirmed James Richard “Rick” Perry as U.S. secretary of energy, installing the former Texas governor to the government’s top nuclear weapons, waste, and energy post after an uncontroversial 62-37 vote. Perry was sworn in hours later and addressed employees at DOE headquarters for the first time today. Every Senate Republican and 10 […]

Bechtel National and the Energy Department could have saved about $2 million if they had reached an agreement to cancel orders for equipment the Hanford Site’s Waste Treatment Plant (WTP) did not urgently need, the agency’s inspector general wrote in a new report. Bechtel is building the plant at the site near Richland, Wash., to treat 56 million […]

The absence of senior leadership at the Trump administration’s Cabinet agencies threatens to leave contractors without clear policy direction on matters including the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons and cleanup complexes, executives said Tuesday. There is no imminent end in sight to this dilemma, they acknowledged. Panelists at the ExchangeMonitor’s Nuclear Deterrence Summit spoke two […]

The commissioner of the Ohio county south of the Energy Department’s Portsmouth Site has taken a local mayor to task for his resistance to the waste disposal facility DOE intends to build at the former uranium enrichment facility. Earlier this month, Mayor Billy Spencer of Piketon, the village of 2,000 adjacent to the Portsmouth cleanup, petitioned DOE to […]

  Fluor Idaho officials will test 11 groundwater monitoring wells on the Idaho National Laboratory site this spring following the detection of the hazardous chemical tetrachloroethylene, or PCE, inside two of the wells last year. The PCE surprised state and federal officials when it showed up in concentrations well above safe drinking water levels during […]

The Richland Operations Office will review how its prime contractors at the Hanford Site in Washington state are passing down nuclear quality assurance requirements to subcontractors and qualifying them after questions were raised about the recently completed River Corridor Closure Contract. A Department of Energy Inspector General’s Office audit report released on Feb. 17 found […]

The Energy Department and some potential contractors are keeping quiet as the agency reviews the bids for the new liquid waste contract at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. The department could announce an award in early April, based on the June 30, 2017, expiration date on incumbent Savannah River Remediation’s contract and the […]

Revenue at Veolia, the French transnational that purchased California-based nuclear-cleanup technology company Kurion last year, just about stabilized in 2016, with the company predicting growth in 2017 in a press release Thursday. Revenue at the Paris-based water and waste group slipped less than 1 percent to roughly €24 billion, or a little more than $25 billion, […]

The Energy Department will soon begin retrieving highly radioactive calcine waste stored for years at the Idaho National Laboratory. The initial phase of the retrieval project, expected to cost DOE close to $50 million and last through 2022, involves moving the powdered calcine waste out of the oldest No. 1 storage facility and into a […]

At some point in the future, the Energy Department will have to crank shipments of radioactively contaminated material to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) into overdrive to meet an internal projection of roughly 20 shipments a week over the mine’s 35-year operational life. In the 35 years running through 2034, DOE thinks the New […]