Publications: Weapons Cleanup Monitor

Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS) has joined the Department of Energy’s motion requesting dismissal of Washington state’s lawsuit seeking better chemical vapor protection for workers at the Hanford Site. DOE and its tank farm contractor both argue the state has no legal standing to file the lawsuit in U.S. District Court for Eastern Washington, but […]

A worker at the Energy Department’s Hanford Site near Richland, Wash., suffered no internal contamination after being exposed to radiation while assigned to preparing the Plutonium Finishing Plant (PFP) for demolition. The July incident was not disclosed until late last month in the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) site representative report for the week […]

LAS VEGAS — The Energy Department wants to build an above-ground waste-storage facility at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Calrsbad, N.M., and expects to submit an application to state regulators in the coming weeks, the agency’s top nuclear-waste-cleanup-policy regulator said here Wednesday. “I would expect the permit mod would probably be submitted in the […]

LAS VEGAS — By April, the first shipments of transuranic waste since 2014 could be rolling into the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., according to a nominal timeline provided here by a DOE official at the ExchangeMonitor’s 2016 RadWaste Summit. The April date assumes DOE approves WIPP prime contractor Nuclear […]

LAS VEGAS — Both the Energy Department and one of its contractors openly acknowledged here during a meeting of nuclear cleanup experts that the agency most likely will be funded under yet another short-term federal spending bill to start fiscal 2017, once again necessitating the sort of budgetary puts and takes that bedevil project managers and […]

The Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) is only 27 percent complete and will cost $17.2 billion, including the $5 billion already spent, according to a recent cost estimate from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Officials with the National Nuclear Security Administration discussed the estimate Thursday during a media briefing and tour of the […]

The Hanford Atomic Metal Trades Council (HAMTC) and the Hanford Site’s tank farm contractor have signed a memorandum of understanding to lift the stop work order halting any work in the waste storage areas unless workers are using supplied air respirator. The parties signed the agreement, which requires certain conditions be met, on Wednesday. No […]

The Hanford Site’s tank farm contractor has been given a national safety for the second consecutive year, this time for better protection of workers against potentially deadly arc flashes. Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS) received the Voluntary Protection Programs (VPP) Innovation Award this week at the VPP Participants’ Association national conference in Kissimmee, Fla. Until […]

Paducah-Area Congressman to Resign Tuesday Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.), the U.S. congressman whose district includes the Energy Department’s Paducah site, said Monday he will resign effective Sept. 6, cutting short his final term in Congress following his decision not to seek re-election in the wake of an ethics investigation last year. Whitfield’s office announced the […]

Washington Closure Hanford on Monday transferred the last of its Hanford Site field cleanup work to CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co. About 300 workers transferred with the projects to CH2M Hill or its subcontractors. Washington Closure, the Hanford River Corridor Closure prime contractor for 11 years, peaked at more than 1,200 workers in 2012 when […]

The Savannah River Site in South Carolina has begun making space to temporarily store even more canisters of vitrified radioactive waste in Glass Waste Storage Building 1 (GWSB 1) by double-stacking the canisters on top of each other, according to update issued Thursday. Double-stacking formally started on Aug. 25, the Department of Energy facility said. […]

Congress returns to Washington after Labor Day to the legislative morass that entangled the Energy Department’s fiscal 2017 budget before lawmakers stormed out of town in mid-July for their traditional summer recess, again raising the possibility of a stopgap spending bill that freezes the agency’s legacy waste-cleanup funding at the 2016 level of roughly $6.2 billion. While that […]

The dust is now settling around building K-27 at the Energy Department’s Oak Ridge Reservation, marking a prominent, but by no means final milestone for the agency’s cleanup of the former uranium enrichment complex DOE is redeveloping into the East Tennessee Technology Park. When K-27 fell Tuesday, it marked the first time in the agency’s history that […]

It was pencils down Tuesday for aspirant Energy Department contractors bidding on a 10-year liquid waste management contract at the Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C., that could be worth $4 billion to $6 billion, including an option. AECOM, lead on the Savannah River Remediation (SRR) consortium in charge of the work today under an eight-year, $4.1 billion […]

Gearing up to defend its turf as top dog of the Energy Department’s legacy liquid-waste cleanup operations, Los Angeles-based AECOM is moving an executive with experience in nuclear waste management into a senior position at its company’s Nuclear and Environment Strategic Business Unit, according to an internal memo dated Aug. 22. Effective Oct. 1, Terri Marts will become […]

The Energy Department picked up the last two options on the stopgap legacy waste remediation contract it awarded to Los Alamos National Security (LANS) last year, keeping the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s chastened prime as lead cleanup contractor there for another year at a cost of roughly $155 million. The department announced the move in a […]

A pair of steel canisters that were not perfectly sealed after they were filled with glass-immobilized waste have been tucked away at the Savannah River Site’s Defense Waste Processing Facility Glass Waste Storage Building, according to a report posted online recently by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board. As of Aug. 18, the canisters remained […]

Congress was out and Washington was empty, but that didn’t stop news from breaking during our annual August publication break. As chronicled in the Weapons Complex Morning Briefing, here are a few stories that we’ve been following.   Hanford Tank AY-102 Waste Removal to Resume in October Hanford Site contractor Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS) […]

Workers at the Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., checked off a major milestone Thursday, when they finished almost three months of practicing the stricter new waste-disposal procedures they will follow when the nation’s only transuranic waste-disposal facility reopens. Taken together with a company spokesman’s Thursday statement that WIPP prime Nuclear […]

WASHINGTON — There might be some adjustments to the recently completed shakeup of the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) in Washington, D.C., the agency’s No. 2 nuclear cleanup official said Wednesday. “There’s going to be tweaks that need to be made at some point,” Mark Whitney, DOE’s principal deputy assistant secretary for environmental […]

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management is giving contractors a few extra days to submit their proposals for two contracts. The due date for the liquid waste management contract at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina has been pushed back by two business days, to 3 p.m. EDT on Aug. 31, according […]

The Energy Department believes it will take at least until next summer to finish demolition of the two primary buildings at the Separations Process Research Unit in upstate New York, where the agency remains mired in a business dispute with its prime demolition contractor. The two main buildings at the experimental Cold War-era plutonium-production plant, […]

The Energy Department this week issued the final request for proposals for a small-business-only contract to provide technical support for a legally mandated environmental review DOE must conduct before finalizing a two-phase plan to decontaminate and demolish facilities at the West Valley Demonstration Project: a former spent-fuel reprocessing plant in upstate New York. The five-year […]

The Energy Department said Thursday it has pulled the trigger on the final two options of Savannah River Nuclear Solutions’ management and operations contract for the Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C., keeping the partnership on the job for almost two more years of work. The options just exercised are the last two on the deal and […]

The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) wants a heads-up before the Energy Department transfers a problematic batch of transuranic waste from a commercial storage facility in Texas to a DOE defense nuclear site such as the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. Moreover, according to a letter dated July 29 from DNFSB Chairman Joyce Connery to […]

Outgoing New Mexico Environment Secretary Ryan Flynn says he’s going to have a late-morning coffee and a midafternoon beer after his three-and-a-half-year tenure in Gov. Susana Martinez’s (R) Cabinet officially ends on Aug. 12. There’s a nap planned, too, the 38-year-old, soon-to-be former Cabinet secretary told Weapons Complex Monitor Tuesday in a brief farewell telephone interview. […]

Like Congress, the ExchangeMonitor is going on recess in August, and Weapons Complex Monitor will not be published during the second and third weeks of the month. We’ll still be in the office, so keep the news tips coming, and look for the next weekly newsletter in your inbox on Friday, Aug. 26.