Publications: Weapons Cleanup Monitor

The official Facebook for the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management has hit 1,000 likes. “Thank you to everyone who ‘likes’ EM’s national Facebook page,” the agency’s nuclear cleanup branch said on the social media site. “We recently surpassed 1,000 likes since launching our page in late May this year. We will continue to share progress […]

The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board has determined it has jurisdiction over the Mixed Waste Landfill at the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, but will forgo oversight of the facility, DNFSB Chairman Joyce Connery said in an Oct. 27 letter to a nongovernmental watchdog organization. The closed landfill covers 2.6 acres at the Department of […]

Hanford Site cleanup contractor CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co. has sealed a subcontract for construction of storage containers to hold cesium and strontium capsules. Georgia-based nuclear materials services provider NAC International has received a $23 million contract to design and build 16 dry storage casks that will hold 1,936 highly radioactive cesium and strontium capsules now […]

Washington state is still waiting for Energy Department contractor Washington River Protection Solutions to show its work on an estimate that equipping workers with respirators and other gear to protect them from vapors at the Hanford Site’s waste storage tank farms would cost hundreds of millions of dollars and add years to the site’s cleanup schedule. […]

Energy Department contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership was back on the job preparing to reopen the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) only about two days after the latest rockfall in the deep underground salt mine near Carlsbad, N.M., the agency wrote on its website late Tuesday. Workers with Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP) made their way back underground Saturday, […]

Plutonium metal operations at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site resumed last month, following a yearlong suspension that started with a safety pause induced in September 2015 by facility management and operations contractor Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS). Plutonium metal operations, in which plutonium is repackaged from its original storage container in K Area, to […]

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory technology used at the Hanford Site in Washington state this year received an R&D 100 Award, an annual contest by R&D Magazine sometimes called the “Oscars of Innovation.” The Department of Energy lab developed technology that allows scientists and engineers to remotely look at underground soil environments in real time, in […]

Centrus Energy Corp., of Bethesda, Md., is stretching out decommissioning and decontamination of the American Centrifuge Project site in Pike County, Ohio, by more than a year, cutting staff and slowing the pace of work there, the company’s chief executive said in a Thursday conference call. “The schedule of that work has changed after some […]

Nuclear waste and the billions of dollars the Energy Department spends each year to clean it up do not go away after a presidential campaign — even a grinding, vitriolic campaign like the one Donald Trump won Tuesday —and nobody knows it better than business. As common after an election as calls for unity from the president-elect […]

Washington state will remain a plaintiff in a lawsuit it brought against the Department of Energy and its Hanford Site waste storage tank farm contractor, Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS), demanding better protection from chemical vapors for Hanford workers. On Thursday, Judge Thomas Rice ruled in U.S. District Court for Eastern Washington against a motion […]

The Washington state Department of Ecology has fined Perma-Fix Northwest $36,400 for the improper handling of some mixed dangerous and radioactive waste apparently left by the last owner of the company’s plant in Richland. Perma-Fix purchased the facility from Pacific EcoSolutions in 2007. The plant treats, size reduces, and packages low-level radioactive and mixed waste […]

The Department of Energy has been given three more years to meet milestones for building additional caps over contaminated soil in Hanford tank farms after it became apparent the agency could not meet the project’s previously set deadlines. DOE built two waste barriers the size of football fields or larger in 2007 and 2010. Under […]

Savannah River Site Watch got the green light from Grammy Award winner Bonnie Raitt to lobby outside of her Oct. 28 concert in North Charleston, where the group collected signatures in opposition to bringing more nuclear materials to South Carolina. “Bonnie follows these nuclear waste issues and she’s very supportive of our work,” said SRS […]

Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII) on Thursday reported lower revenue and operating income in the third quarter of 2016, decreases it attributed in part to lower revenues in shipbuilding programs and lower sales volumes in some contracts. Company revenue fell 6.5 percent, to $1.68 billion, from $1.8 billion during the same quarter last year. Quarterly diluted […]

There hasn’t been much catharsis this cycle for political junkies within the Energy Department’s nuclear complex who want to see some of the lightning from the presidential race trickle down to contests that may affect them professionally. Neither Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton nor Republican candidate Donald Trump have said much about the DOE nuclear […]

Another underground rockfall prompted workers to evacuate from the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) on Thursday, the Energy Department said. The collapse occurred even as WIPP prime contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP) prepares to welcome DOE officials Nov. 14 for the final review standing in the way of reopening the deep-underground transuranic waste-storage facility, which […]

The Fluor Corp. segment that handles nuclear cleanup work for the U.S. Energy Department reported a dip in profits for the third quarter of 2016, while the construction and energy giant overall took a massive earnings hit due to a charge on a petrochemical facility that has nothing to do with the company’s DOE nuclear business. […]

The ExchangeMonitor has launched the Your Voice/Our Voice opinion space in its weekly Weapons Complex Monitor e-newsletter. If you or your company is involved with the legacy nuclear cleanup work managed by the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management, we want to hear from you. Send us a short letter to the editor (300 words) […]

A federal judge on Monday would not dismiss a South Carolina lawsuit seeking redress for the Energy Department’s failure to remove plutonium from the state, but she did ask the sides whether the dispute should be moved to a different court. In declining to rule on DOE’s claim that South Carolina has no standing to sue […]

In a third quarter during which it announced a major acquisition in its commercial nuclear power business, BWX Technologies, of Lynchburg, Va., essentially held steady, registering small gains in revenue amid a slight dip in profit, the company reported late Monday. Overall, BWXT posted quarterly operating income of just over $62 million, down sharply from […]

Energy Department contractor CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co. on Tuesday began demolition of the Plutonium Finishing Plant at the Hanford Site in Richland, Wash., beginning with the south canyon airlocks of the plant’s Plutonium Reclamation Facility. Demolition had been slated to start Monday but was delayed by high winds. Tuesday was another windy day on the central plateau, but CH2m […]

The Tri-Party Agreement for the Hanford Site in Washington state has been amended to delete the requirement that the Department of Energy submit a 2017 Hanford Lifecycle Scope, Schedule, and Cost Report to its state and federal regulators in January. The department has been required under the Tri-Party Agreement to prepare the report annually as […]

There is still no timetable for starting up the officially delayed Integrated Waste Treatment Unit at the Department of Energy’s Idaho Site, but it will need a replacement part — which DOE has in stock — that will take up to three months to install, according to an agency briefing last week. DOE this week […]

The Washington Ecology Department wants more details about a contractor estimate that requiring workers to wear supplied air respirators at the Hanford Site’s waste storage tank farm could add years and hundreds of millions of dollars to cleanup of the Cold War-era Department of Energy site, according to official correspondence published online Wednesday. Earlier this year, some […]

The Energy Department’s prime cleanup contractor on the former West Valley spent-fuel reprocessing facility in upstate New York on Wednesday shipped the first of three massive loads of contaminated vitrification equipment on its way to a private disposal facility in Texas. Lynette Bennett, a spokeswoman for CH2M Hill BWXT West Valley, confirmed Thursday the equipment […]

Fluor Federal Services has installed nine new well monitors to measure the amount of toxic trichloroethene in the groundwater at the Energy Department’s Paducah Site in Kentucky, DOE said. The nine wells will help DOE prepare for future groundwater treatment at the site, which is contaminated by the toxic industrial solvent used to clean equipment […]

The Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management unveiled a logo Tuesday morning that promotes a concept the agency calls “One EM.” The minimalist header — featuring a green mountain range and a stylized, flowing river set against the backdrop of an orange, sunswept sky — includes branding similar to the “One EM Team” concept employees of the EM […]

A small cadre of Energy Department Environmental Management personnel based at the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) Nevada Field Office may soon get their own private office space to insulate them from NNSA personnel at the former nuclear weapons-testing site, according to an internal DOE document. Weapons Complex Monitor obtained a copy of the undated, unsigned […]