Publications: Weapons Cleanup Monitor

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 […]

The state of South Carolina appears to hope a letter sent out by the Energy Department that addresses the timeline for new nuclear waste shipments to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) will buffer the state’s argument that the federal government should continue building the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) at the Savannah River […]

Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC) has been ordered to pay $216,080 in back pay and compensation to two whistleblowers it removed from the job in 2012. The computer specialist employees had raised issues with a new electronic medical system when CSC held the Hanford Site occupational medicine contract. In 2014 the Occupational Safety and Health Administration […]

Washington River Protection Solutions has emptied the 15th of 16 waste tanks in the Hanford Site’s C Tank Farm to regulatory standards. A court-enforced consent decree deadline requires the last of the C Farm tanks to be emptied to regulatory standards by March 2024. Tank C-111 is also the 16th of Hanford’s 149 leak-prone single-shell […]

Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz on Tuesday offered strong support for a new plutonium dilution and disposal method in place of the mixed oxide fuel program that the Obama administration is pushing to cancel, calling the latter an essentially “impossible” effort. The controversy over the MOX program will be one of the next administration’s primary challenges […]

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Transuranic waste has been piling up around the Energy Department’s nuclear complex since the only disposal site for such material closed in 2014, and it will continue to pile up in relative safety for at least a little while longer, senior DOE officials said here Thursday. “We’re still looking at good space […]

The Washington state Attorney General’s Office this week forcefully challenged the federal government’s request that a U.S. District Court dismiss the state lawsuit filed over worker safety at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site. In a motion filed in August, the Department of Justice said the state had no legal standing under the 1976 Resource […]

This month, the Energy Department will begin preparing some 6 metric tons of weapon-usable plutonium at the Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C., for disposal at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M. Downblending will begin once DOE completes an assessment of a recently completed two-month long cold run of the Savannah River Site’s (SRS) […]

A permit that will allow Energy Department contractor Bechtel National to build a facility crucial to starting solidification of Cold War-era waste in Washington state by 2022 goes out for public comment next month, the state Ecology Department announced. “Ecology plans to start a 30-day public comment period in middle October on a proposed new […]

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — A tranche of the same kind of transuranic waste that leaked radiation into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in 2014 could be cleaned up and ready to ship out of the Los Alamos National Laboratory next summer, a Department of Energy official said here. There are still some 60 barrels of what […]

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — With her customary caution and courtesy, the Energy Department’s top nuclear cleanup official would neither confirm nor deny that her career at the agency would end when President Barack Obama leaves office on Jan. 20. Asked here at the 2016 National Cleanup Workshop whether she would consider staying at DOE’s Office of […]