Publications: Weapons Cleanup Monitor

A $10.5 million grant from the Department of Energy will finally enable the University of Arkansas to move ahead with demolition of the Southwest Experimental Fast Oxide Reactor (SEFOR) facility, which has gone unused for 30 years. The funding will pay for a series of cleanup operations culminating in decommissioning and dismantlement of the facility […]

The Department of Energy last week issued two grants worth nearly $3 million for further research into deploying robots in hazardous nuclear cleanup operations. The grants to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and the University of Massachusetts Lowell were provided under a program solicitation for the National Science Foundation’s National Robotics Initiative, which aims to […]

Waste Control Specialists (WCS) said Tuesday it has received permission from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to keep a potentially dangerous batch of federal transuranic waste in Andrews, Texas, for another two years. The company in June sought permission to retain custody of the improperly packaged, radioactive nitrate-salt waste from the Energy Department’s Los Alamos National […]

Just after three senators introduced a bill to tighten whistleblower protection for Energy Department employees and contractors, the agency itself released a new internal order aimed at ratcheting up those same protections without congressional action. DOE order O 221.1B, “Reporting Fraud, Waste and Abuse to the Office of Inspector General,” was approved Sept. 27, only […]

The last major activity is underway at the Hanford Site’s Plutonium Finishing Plant before demolition starts on the facility’s large, central building and attached annexes. In late September a crane removed the topmost part of the roof of the Plutonium Reclamation Facility, a fifth and sixth floor rising above the rest of the plant. Since […]

The Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site said Friday it has begun downblending 6 metric tons of surplus nuclear weapon-usable plutonium. The milestone follows DOE’s announcement on April 5 that it would downblend the material and send it to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico for disposal. The process of blending plutonium oxide […]

Three Democratic U.S. senators who have pushed the Energy Department to reform its whistleblower policies will introduce a bill that would expand and tighten whistleblower protection for agency and contractor personnel. Sponsored by Sens. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and titled “Department of Energy Whistleblower Accountability Act,” the bill would […]

A 30-million-gallon reservoir for decontaminated salt waste at the Savannah River Site will be ready about seven months later than expected, but still much sooner than the Energy Department is expected to need it, a project manager with the site’s liquid waste contractor said Monday. The massive tank will be ready in May 2017, Jon […]

Only days after news of his departure from the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management leaked, Mark Whitney, the agency’s No. 2 nuclear-cleanup official, has joined AECOM, the Los Angeles-based DOE contractor announced. Whitney “has been appointed chief operating officer of AECOM’s nuclear and environment strategic business unit,” AECOM wrote in the press release. The company […]

AECOM, BWX Technologies, and Fluor Corp. all bid on a 10-year liquid waste management contract at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C., that could be worth $4 billion to $6 billion, sources told Weapons Complex Monitor. The Energy Department would not authorize anyone to comment on the record for this story. […]

It was not clear this week whether Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) prime contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership began a scheduled operational readiness review that is a critical choke point for reopening the nation’s only disposal facility for the radioactively contaminated material known as transuranic waste. Bill Taylor and Tim Runyon, spokesmen for the Department of […]

An Atkins-led joint venture beat out four competing bids for a five-year, $318 million Energy Department contract to operate depleted uranium hexafluoride (DUF6) conversion facilities at DOE’s former gaseous diffusion plants near Paducah, Ky., and Piketon, Ohio. Atkins partnered with Fluor Corp. and Westinghouse to form Mid-America Conversion Services. The companies announced their winning bid […]

Under the continuing resolution President Barack Obama signed Thursday after weeks of congressional bickering totally unrelated to nuclear programs, the Energy Department’s legacy nuclear-cleanup office is now funded at a slightly higher level than the White House requested for fiscal 2017. With the season’s only must-pass bill out of the way, Congress now adjourns until […]

Transuranic waste from the Savannah River Site (SRS) will not be certified for shipment to New Mexico for permanent disposal until at least March, the top Department of Energy official at the South Carolina facility told a citizens group this week. Earlier this year, DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office released stricter new standards for packaging and […]

CB&I AREVA MOX Services provided “misleading” information in determining how much construction of the Savannah River Site’s Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) will cost, and how long it will take to build the plant, according to an updated project baseline report released Sept. 23 by the Energy Department’s Office of Project Management Oversight and […]

The state of Idaho will fine the Energy Department up to $3,600 daily after today, when as of the stroke of midnight DOE will officially have blown a deadline to start treating almost 900,000 gallons of sodium-bearing liquid waste at the Idaho National Laboratory. This waste was to be processed by the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit (IWTU): a so-called steam reformer […]

Congress adjourned for the week without passing a short-term continuing resolution to keep the government funded at fiscal 2016 levels until Dec. 9, leaving lawmakers only another week to put finishing touches on the bill or risk another government shutdown. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) began the week with hopes that the upper chamber […]

The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board said this week it has bulked up its technical staff, bringing the headcount at the independent Energy Department watchdog up to 116. Known as DNFSB, the board comprises five civilian members appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate to provide independent oversight of agencies and contractors at […]

Centrus Energy, of Bethesda, Md., said Thursday it has received a one-year, $25 million contract from UT-Battelle to continue the experimental uranium enrichment program known as the American Centrifuge at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The American Centrifuge project has shrunk considerably since 2015, when the Energy Department pulled the plug on an […]

The city of Santa Fe, N.M., on Sept. 16 made public a Department of Energy report that says it will take about 20 years and cost up to $4 billion for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management to clean up some 5,000 cubic meters of Cold War-era nuclear waste at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). It […]

Cleanup of a former gaseous diffusion plant in Ohio would be underfunded by nearly $80 million on an annualized basis and layoffs will be imminent if Congress does not increase funding for the project next week, an Energy Department contractor said Thursday. The cleanup, funded under a 10-year, $2.6 billion contract with Fluor-BWXT, depends not only […]

The electrical utility building that eventually will feed power to crucial liquid waste treatment systems at the Energy Department’s Hanford Site near Richland, Wash., has been tied to its permanent electrical power source in what contractor Bechtel National said in a Thursday press release is “an important step toward operations.” Though announced Thursday, Building 87, […]

A decades’ worth of cleanup work at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), which including options is valued at $1.7 billion, is officially out for bids, the agency’s Office of Environmental Management announced late Wednesday. The work entails cleaning up Cold War-era waste, both toxic and radioactive, scattered throughout the sprawling, 36-square-mile LANL campus. Big […]

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — With its budget for legacy nuclear cleanup squeezed, the Energy Department thinks remediation projects across the country could benefit from a change in strategy similar to what was laid out this summer in an expansive new framework approved for the Los Alamos National Laboratory, senior agency officials said last week at a […]

A new Energy Department assessment of waste disposal practices at the Savannah River Site concluded that radiation doses are being maintained within appropriate limits and should not pose threats to the public or facility personnel. The Energy Department’s Office of Enterprise Assessments (EA) conducted the evaluation in February and March and released its findings this […]

The New Mexico Environment Department on Monday approved the Energy Department’s request to ease airflow restrictions in the deep-underground Waste Isolation Pilot Plant: a move the agency says will help ensure smoother waste disposal operations at the mine, once it reopens. The modification is effective Oct. 19, according to a letter Monday from Kathryn Roberts, […]

An article in the Sept. 16 edition of Weapons Complex Monitor should have said the Department of Energy is overseeing the downblending of 6 metric tons of weapon-usable plutonium at Savannah River Site, which is scheduled to begin this month.

Possible actions to protect Hanford Site workers from chemical vapors could result in missed milestones under the Department of Energy consent decree mandate with Washington state for emptying single-shell waste storage tanks, according to a preliminary report. Kevin Smith, manager of DOE’s Office of River Protection, said in a status update last week he was […]