Publications: Weapons Cleanup Monitor

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A Richland, Wash., resident has voluntarily withdrawn a lawsuit demanding that now-former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy issue or deny the Hanford Site air operating permit required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 […]

Susan Cange, second-highest in the chain of command at the Energy Department’s nuclear cleanup office, became acting assistant secretary for environmental management on Friday. Cange, a career civil servant who joined the Office of Environmental Management in Washington, D.C., from the Oak Ridge site in Tennessee late last year, replaces Monica Regalbuto on a temporary […]

There was no evidence this week of a blanket gag order on external communication from the Energy Department under newly inaugurated President Donald Trump, whose administration has tweeted steadily since Inauguration Day from the official @ENERGY Twitter account. The Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies were directed to stand down temporarily from communication with […]

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said it will not penalize private contractor Waste Control Specialists for moving potentially explosive barrels of federally owned nuclear waste without the proper authorization in 2014. In June 2014, in apparent violation of an NRC order, Waste Control Specialists moved 73 containers of transuranic nitrate-salt waste generated by weapons programs at […]

Editor’s note: This is the first 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 to date on news affecting Department of Energy […]

The Hanford Site’s tank farm contractor has agreed to pay a $5.275 million settlement to resolve federal allegations of time-card fraud. Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS) was accused of submitting false claims to the Department of Energy between October 2008 and July 2013 concerning internal audit processes, along with time cards seeking payment for worker […]

Despite progress made to address vapors from radioactive waste storage tanks at the Hanford Site in Washington state, union worker concerns have not decreased, according to a new review from the Department of Energy’s Office of Enterprise Assessments (EA). The review largely echoed findings released in late November by the Centers for Disease Control and […]

 Idaho National Laboratory officials still hope to bring in a shipment of spent nuclear fuel for a research project with South Korea this spring. But it appears unlikely that will be allowed due to ongoing delays at the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit. Under Idaho’s 1995 settlement agreement with the Energy Department, Idaho Attorney General Lawrence […]

The Savannah River Site liquid waste tank farms hold less than 35 million gallons of waste for the first time since 1999, according to a Jan. 9 Facebook post from Savannah River Remediation (SRR), the Department of Energy facility’s liquid waste contractor. Since taking over the contract in 2009, SRR’s goal has been to rid the […]

The Energy Department is likely next year to miss another major nuclear waste removal milestone set in its 1995 settlement agreement with the state of Idaho. Under the agreement, DOE committed to remove from the Idaho National Laboratory site some 65,000 cubic meters of stored transuranic waste by the end of 2018. But limited operations […]