Publications: Weapons Cleanup Monitor

Fluor Idaho officials say they plan to start testing again next week at the Idaho National Laboratory site’s Integrated Waste Treatment Unit, circulating simulated waste through the facility’s system for the first time in about nine months. The simulant run, to last 10 days, is intended to determine whether a newly designed auger grinder component […]

The Atkins-led Mid-America Conversion Services joint venture has started work on an Energy Department contract to process depleted uranium hexafluoride left over from Cold War uranium enrichment in Ohio and Kentucky. In late September, DOE awarded Mid-America Conversion Services a five-year, $318 million depleted uranium hexafluoride (DUF6) treatment contract, unseating incumbent BWXT Conversion Services. Fluor […]

The Savannah River Site’s main waste processing facility will be offline for much of the year to allow for replacement of a key component. The Energy Department said on Feb. 3 that site liquid waste contractor Savannah River Remediation (SRR) is preparing to replace a melter in the Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF), which converts […]

The Los Alamos National Laboratory’s nuclear criticality safety program in fiscal 2016 fell short of Department of Energy requirements, but an improvement plan has been established, according to an annual nuclear criticality safety program metrics report submitted to the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB). The DNFSB asked DOE in February 2016 to provide a […]

The bench trial for the Hanford Site worker vapor protection lawsuit brought by Washington state and other plaintiffs will be postponed until March 5, 2018, Judge Thomas Rice ruled Monday in U.S. District Court for Eastern Washington. The plaintiffs and defendants jointly requested the trial be delayed more than four months from Oct. 30, 2017, […]

Earnings at engineering services firm Jacobs, a support contractor at a number of Energy Department sites, rose about 30 percent to over $60 million in its fiscal first quarter, even as revenue fell 10 percent to just under $3 billion, the company reported Wednesday. The 2017 first quarter benefited from fewer after-tax charges related to the […]

Public tours are being offered again this year at the Department of Energy’s Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Ohio, the shuttered facility’s cleanup contractor announced Monday. “We are pleased to continue these special tours for the public to get a close-up view of the former uranium enrichment facilities while they are being addressed under the […]

A federal judge has dismissed South Carolina’s claim seeking $100 million for the missed plutonium disposal deadline at the Savannah River Site’s Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF). U.S. District Judge J. Michelle Childs on Wednesday also sent another request against the Department of Energy – for the removal of 1 metric of weapons-usable plutonium […]

A Washington state House of Representatives committee heard testimony from ill Hanford Site workers and their families on Thursday that even critics of a proposed workers’ compensation bill called compelling. But those opponents told the House Labor and Workplace Standards Committee that while they were sympathetic to the suffering of the workers who testified, House […]

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. […]