Publications: Weapons Cleanup Monitor

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 […]

The three agencies that oversee cleanup at the Hanford Site near Richland, Wash., shrugged off concerns from a local citizens’ board about converting one of several spring meetings about the former plutonium production site to a webinar from an in-person affair, a document published Tuesday shows. The Tri-Party Agreement Agencies — the Energy Department, the […]

  Sandia National Laboratories Director Jill Hruby nearly topped Business Insider’s list this week of the 43 most powerful female engineers of 2017 in the U.S. technology sector. Hruby came in at No. 2, behind only Peggy Johnson, executive vice president for business development at Microsoft. Barbara Rusinko, a president at major Department of Energy […]

Bunch Tongate was confirmed as secretary of the New Mexico Environment Department on Monday, the state agency announced Tuesday. “Yesterday, Secretary Designate Butch Tongate was confirmed unanimously by the Senate as Secretary of the New Mexico Environment Department,” the department stated in a press release. Tongate has been acting environment secretary since his predecessor, Ryan […]

Waste retrieval from the Hanford Site double-shell tank with an interior leak has been completed to the requirements of a settlement agreement between the Department of Energy and the Washington state Department of Ecology, according to DOE. The federal agency and Hanford tank farm contractor Washington River Protection Solutions told the state that two technologies […]

Global information technology provider Leidos this week reported higher earnings in the fourth quarter of 2016 and the full fiscal year, in part due to its acquisition last year of Lockheed Martin’s Information Systems & Global Solutions (IS&GS) business segment. The company reported revenue of $2.58 billion in the fourth quarter of 2016, up from […]

A story in the Feb. 17 issue of Weapons Complex Monitor (“DOE IDs First Five Sites to Ship to WIPP,” Volume 28, No. 7) should have said there are 14,000 cubic meters of transuranic waste at the Idaho National Laboratory. Waste shipped from Idaho is ultimately projected to take up about 22,000 cubic meters once […]

Huntington Ingalls Industries on Thursday reported modest revenue and operating income increases for both fourth-quarter and full-year 2016. Specifically, the shipbuilder reported fourth-quarter revenue of $1.9 billion, a 0.9 percent increase from the same year-ending period of 2015. Meanwhile, it brought in $7.1 billion in revenue over the full year, up by 0.7 percent from […]

Editor’s note: This is the second 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 […]

South Carolina’s new governor thinks the state Attorney General’s Office should refile its $100 million plutonium disposition claim against the Department of Energy. Meanwhile, a spokesperson said Attorney General Alan Wilson is still contemplating his next move after a federal judge last week dismissed the state’s monetary claim over DOE’s failure to meet its plutonium […]

Two Hanford Site workers received medical checks and were released to return to work after reporting an odor in the Department of Energy facility’s central area at the start of the day shift Thursday. The workers were in the 200 East Area but more than a mile from the closest waste tank farm, according to […]

David Campbell is leaving Bechtel National for a senior management position at competitor Veolia Nuclear Solutions, Bechtel confirmed Wednesday. Campbell, who had been with Bechtel since 2012, was most recently the company’s vice president for marketing and business development. His last day at Bechtel, where he focused on environmental cleanup and nuclear security, is Feb. […]

Cold War nuclear cleanup managed by the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) is responsible for more than half of the federal government’s total environmental liability of $447 billion, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said this week. The cost of the remaining cleanup work across DOE’s nuclear complex was estimated at $257 billion as of […]

The Savannah River National Laboratory has opened an office in Richland, Wash., to support its work at the Hanford Site. The Department of Energy facility’s work has included leading the team of experts who produced the 2014 Hanford Tank Vapor Assessment Report and supporting the Office of River Protection plan to start treating low-activity waste […]

Four federal nuclear sites and one privately operated waste disposal facility will send a total of 128 shipments of transuranic waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) from April 2017 to January 2018, the Energy Department announced Tuesday. These will be the first waste shipments to WIPP following the February 2014 underground fire and […]

The first three technical issues that have prevented construction on key parts of the Hanford Site’s Waste Treatment Plant since 2012 have been resolved, according to the Department of Energy. Work continues on five additional technical issues identified after then-Energy Secretary Steven Chu directed an in-depth look that year at possible problems at the plant. […]

The Department of Energy is taking steps to catch up lost time on demolition of the Hanford Site’s Plutonium Finishing Plant after an unusually cold and snowy winter delayed work by several weeks. As of Tuesday, the demolition project had lost the equivalent of 23 10-hour days this winter, or more than a month of […]

The Energy Department could develop a new mobile treatment unit to clean up more than 70 barrels of potentially explosive nuclear waste stored at a private contractor in Texas, a source in New Mexico said Tuesday. The 70 barrels, which contain a combination of plutonium-contaminated nitrate salts and organic kitty litter, represent the greater part […]

Fluor Corp.’s work at Energy Department nuclear cleanup sites in Kentucky and Ohio has enhanced the company’s reputation at the agency, the construction giant’s chief executive told investors Friday. Remediation of former gaseous diffusion plants at DOE’s Paducah and Portsmouth facilities is “proving us to be one of the DOE’s go-to contractors,” CEO David Seaton said on Fluor’s 2016 […]

After AECOM quantified a long-projected earnings gain made possible by a smaller-than-expected fine to settle alleged misuse of federal funds, the Los Angeles-based company continued pounding its war drum about the billions of dollars of bid proposals its Management Services division hopes to convert into contract wins this year. AECOM, among the biggest contractors in […]