Publications: Weapons Cleanup Monitor

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 […]

The mayor of the village of Piketon wants the Energy Department to fund an independent assessment of the nuclear landfill the agency wants to build at the former uranium enrichment site near the small town in southeast Ohio. DOE formally decided to build the proposed 100-acre on-site disposal cell in 2015, saying it was the least […]

Kathryn Roberts, who helped regulate major nuclear cleanup projects in New Mexico, is leaving the New Mexico Environment Department to become a project manager at consulting shop Longenecker & Associates, the firm said Tuesday. Roberts, most recently director of the state agency’s Resource Protection Division, will join the firm on Jan. 23, Martin Schneider, senior vice president […]

Despite a few unplanned days off due to wicked winter weather in Washington state, the Energy Department still expects to tear down the Plutonium Finishing Plant at the Hanford Site to the concrete slab on which it was built by a Sept. 30 regulatory deadline, a DOE official said Monday. “Right now, we still think we […]

Prosidian Consulting of North Carolina has been awarded a firm-fixed-price contract worth up to $2 million for management and facilitation services to the Hanford Advisory Board in Washington state. The Department of Energy contract is for a one-year-base period with four one-year options. Prosidian replaces EnviroIssues, which has offices in the Northwest, including near the […]

The Energy Department is on track to empty most of the waste in a leaky double-shell tank at the Hanford Site in Washington state by a March 4 regulatory deadline — a job likely to cost more than $40 million, a DOE official said Wednesday. The final bill for draining waste from Tank AY-102 is […]

By Todd Wright This is a period of change for America and for the Department of Energy (DOE). Fittingly, the transition to a new president and new administration offers the chance to reflect on one of DOE’s core programs: the Office of Environmental Management (EM), and the opportunities that lie ahead. While DOE, like all […]

The environmental remediation contractor for the Department of Energy’s West Valley Demonstration Project in upstate New York earned “very good” ratings in all four categories of its latest performance evaluation. That was a slight dip from the previous evaluation but enough to earn CH2M Hill BWXT West Valley (CHBWV) a $360,000 award fee, 80 percent of the […]

The Trump administration will take a hard look at the Energy Department’s budget for legacy nuclear waste cleanup, Energy Secretary-designate Rick Perry said Thursday during his Senate confirmation hearing. “[P]rioritizing the funding and managing that funding in an appropriate way to clean up these waste sites is going to be very, very high on the priority […]

Centrus Energy Corp. plans to ship low-level waste from the decommissioned American Centrifuge uranium enrichment demonstration facility in Piketon, Ohio, to the Nevada National Security Site for disposal beginning in March, company filings with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission show. “Planning and budgeting for the waste shipments by Centrus, the waste disposal contractor and the transportation […]

French multinational nuclear company AREVA on Wednesday announced the formation of a new subsidiary to manage its operations in the United States. The move is part of the troubled company’s broader restructuring, in which it is focusing on nuclear fuel cycle work and selling off its reactor business. Sam Shakir, an executive with AREVA for […]