Publications: Weapons Cleanup Monitor

Wary that his village will become known only for the pile of radioactive waste the Energy Department plans to leave behind after it cleans up the nearby Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, the mayor of Piketon, Ohio, is pitching the agency on a plan to reinvent the former uranium enrichment site as a DOE technology hub. […]

At least one Energy Department rule, which would strengthen protections for whistleblowers at agency contractors, was delayed by the regulatory freeze President Donald Trump put in place last month, a DOE spokeswoman confirmed Thursday. The new rule, published by now-former President Barack Obama’s administration, clarified that DOE may assess civil penalties against contractors that retaliate against […]

Nevada’s Commission on Nuclear Projects on Tuesday finalized its biannual report to state lawmakers, which outlines an aggressive strategy in contesting potential resumption of licensing activities for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. The commission was established in 1985 to advise the governor and the Nevada Legislature on radioactive waste disposal activities in the state. […]

Nuclear-cleanup sites across the country might learn next week when they may resume shipping radioactively contaminated material and equipment to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M. Officials from cleanup sites overseen by the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) are expected to gather at DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office on Feb. 7-8 for […]

The Energy Department and its contractor at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico are winnowing down the mine’s post-reopening punch list of fixes, a DOE spokesperson said Monday. After last year’s DOE-led operational readiness review, the agency identified 15 fixes for WIPP prime contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP) and the local DOE […]

A highly critical congressional report this week could open the door for Energy Secretary-designate Rick Perry to reverse the Obama administration’s finding that the Energy Department should build a deep-underground disposal site specifically for nuclear waste created by Cold War weapons programs. “DOE did not show that benefits outweighed costs in recommending to the President that the […]

Two weeks into President Donald Trump’s first term, Energy Secretary-designate Rick Perry has crept closer to confirmation in the Senate, and the president’s beachhead and transition teams are laying groundwork to bolster the budget for the National Nuclear Security Administration. The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on Tuesday approved Perry’s nomination by a vote […]

The Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site is seeking approval from agency headquarters to redirect money not needed for salt waste work toward other liquid waste missions. The DOE facility in South Carolina, like the rest of the federal government, is currently being funded at fiscal 2016-enacted levels under a budgetary continuing resolution that expires […]

Fluor Idaho officials say they expect to finish retrieving transuranic waste at the Department of Energy’s Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project in Idaho before the end of the month. Fluor Idaho President Fred Hughes last week said the Idaho National Laboratory site cleanup contractor would finish removing the final 28 boxes, or 89 cubic meters, […]

Energy Department officials say exhumation work remains well ahead of schedule at the Idaho National Laboratory’s Radioactive Waste Management Complex, where transuranic waste generated from nuclear weapons manufacturing was buried in the 1950s and 1960s. Officials last week said they have exhumed 4.5 acres of a minimum requirement of 5.69 acres of “target” waste since […]

An Environmental Protection Agency transition team official for President Donald Trump expressed interest in picking up the pace of cleanup at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site. Trump tapped Washington state Sen. Doug Ericksen (R) to serve as one of 10 transition team members for the EPA in Washington, D.C.; the lawmaker also is the […]

Demolition of the Hanford Site’s Plutonium Finishing Plant is expected to resume next week following a radioactive contamination spread found last week at the Energy Department facility once used to shape plutonium for insertion into nuclear weapons. At about 4:45 p.m. Jan. 27 a radiation monitor issued an alarm near the demolition area of the […]

A Richland, Wash., resident has voluntarily withdrawn a lawsuit demanding that now-former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy issue or deny the Hanford Site air operating permit required under the federal Clean Air Act. Attorneys for Bill Green filed the notice of voluntary dismissal on Dec. 14 in U.S. District Court for Eastern Washington. Judge Salvador […]

Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth has pushed back by up to six months the date for rendering the Energy Department’s 60 year-old X-326 uranium enrichment building cold and dark, according to a senior company executive. “[O]ur goal in the X-326 is to be ‘cold & dark’ by the end of this calendar year,” Dennis Carr, Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth’s program director, […]

Former Assistant Energy Secretary for Environmental Management Monica Regalbuto will remain at the Energy Department as a senior technical adviser for the agency’s $6-billion-a-year legacy nuclear cleanup program, the longtime DOE hand said in a farewell message to colleagues. Weapons Complex Morning Briefing obtained a copy of Regalbuto’s letter. “I am pleased and honored to continue to be part […]

President Donald Trump plans to nominate the Washington-savvy Dan Brouillette, a longtime lobbyist who has also worked at the Energy Department and on Capitol Hill, as deputy secretary of energy, a source familiar with the new administration’s thinking said Thursday. Brouillette, now a senior vice president at the United Services Automobile Association, has spent the past […]

A quote in an article in the Jan. 20 issue of Weapons Complex Monitor, that the price of emptying Tank AY-102 at the Hanford Site is “going to be over $40 million,” should have been attributed to Chris Kemp of the Department of Energy’s Office of River Protection. An article in the Jan. 20 issue described […]

The Energy Department may reclassify its West Valley Demonstration Project as a defense nuclear site, upping the federal funding for which the former spent fuel reprocessing facility is eligible, a local New York newspaper reported last week. Former Energy Sec. Ernest Moniz notified Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) of the possibility Thursday, the Olean Times Herald […]

Plaintiffs and defendants have agreed to mediation in an attempt to settle the lawsuit over worker protection from tank waste vapors at the Hanford Site in Washington state. They filed a joint motion in U.S. District Court for Eastern Washington asking the judge to extend the schedule in the case to allow time for mediation. […]

A five-year, fixed-price, indefinite-quantity/indefinite-delivery technical support contract for the Energy Department’s Moab site in Utah has gone out for bids as a small business set-aside, the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management announced Thursday. The Moab Uranium Mill Tailings Remedial Action (UMTRA) technical assistance contract covers services for the Utah cleanup site including: records management; […]

Secretary of Energy-designate Rick Perry will wait until next week for a confirmation vote in a key Senate committee. Perry, the former Texas governor who helped usher a commercially operated nuclear-waste repository into the state during his 15-year run in Austin, had his initial confirmation hearing before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee last […]

A key Savannah River Site (SRS) waste treatment facility returned to operations last month after a three-month scheduled outage to address equipment concerns. The Saltstone Production Facility (SPF) receives low-radioactive salt solution that has been separated from radioactive sludge. That pre-separation material is stored together in more than 40 liquid waste tanks, which in total hold about […]

Sean Sullivan replaced Joyce Connery as chairman of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board on Wednesday, the federal government’s independent nuclear complex watchdog announced Thursday. Connery was appointed to the board, known as DNFSB, in August 2015 by then-President Barack Obama and designated chairman at the same time. She will remain on the board and can […]

It was not immediately clear whether a federal hiring freeze instituted by the newly installed Donald Trump administration has affected the legacy nuclear cleanup by the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management (EM), which since Trump’s inauguration had posted only a single vacancy to a federal job site. The listing on USAJobs.gov for a […]

A $74.2 million project to clean up the coal ash stored at the Savannah River Site is progressing through its second phase, with roughly two-and-a-half years left to complete the work, a site official reported this week. The D Area Ash Project involves 1.3 million cubic yards of ash stored on 90 acres of land […]

The Energy Department and contractor Fluor Idaho have decided to delay by several years the demolition of an iconic nuclear reactor dome at the Idaho National Laboratory. Officials planned to tear down the dome of the Experimental Breeder Reactor-II last fall — one of the final steps of the EBR-II facility decontamination and decommissioning process […]

  The Hanford Site’s Office of River Protection has obtained samples of glass up to 2,000 years old to help it learn more about how the substance ages as the Department of Energy facility prepares to vitrify, or glassify, tank waste. The ancient glass is being studied to predict how glassified waste might age over […]

Energy Department contractor North Wind Group, of Idaho Falls, Idaho, said Friday it has acquired fellow DOE contractor Portage, also of Idaho Falls, in an all-stock deal. Other terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Portage will operate as a North Wind subsidiary, bringing the parent company’s headcount to about 1,100 employees, according to a […]