Publications: Weapons Cleanup Monitor

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 […]

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — The Energy Department will award hundreds of millions of dollars of work for continued operation of depleted uranium hexafluoride conversion (DUF6) plants at the Paducah Site in Kentucky and the Portsmouth Site in Ohio later this month, a senior DOE procurement official said here Wednesday. “Somebody asked me yesterday if we’re going […]

Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS) has settled a discrimination lawsuit filed against the contractor by a former employee who alleged she was denied a better job opportunity because she was Hispanic and the person who got the job was white. However, terms of the settlement were not released. Victoria Brandner sued SRNS, the Savannah River […]

Salt waste processing at the Savannah River Site is expected to increase now that one of the Department of Energy facility’s new salt solution receipt tanks (SSRT) has begun receiving waste. Earlier this month, liquid waste contractor Savannah River Remediation (SRR) began transferring decontaminated salt solution (DSS) to the tank, which can hold up to […]

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — The stopgap federal budget bill expected to pass next week buys Congress more time, if not much, to sort out its differences on how much the Energy Department should spend on legacy nuclear cleanup, and where, the House’s top DOE appropriator said here Thursday. The so-called continuing resolution, or CR, would freeze spending at […]

The U.S. Department of Justice and Fluor Federal Services are at odds on whether a federal court should throw out a lawsuit that alleges Fluor and Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS) overcharged the federal government more than $5 million for home office expenses and other “unallowable costs” in operation of the Savannah River Site, according […]

Carlsbad, N.M., is open for nuclear business, John Heaton said proudly last week. There are a few irons in the fire — the city is all in favor of the consolidated interim nuclear waste-storage facility Holtec International wants to build outside town — but Carlsbad’s crown jewel is, of course, the Energy Department’s Waste Isolation […]

With the federal appropriations process up in the air, Ohio’s Senate delegation has asked the Senate Appropriations Committee to make sure there is enough funding in the rapidly approaching 2017 fiscal year to continue planned cleanup of the Energy Department’s Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant. “As the fiscal year ends, it does not appear that Congress […]

Former New Mexico Environment Secretary Ryan Flynn, who retired in August after three years as the state’s main liaison on federal nuclear cleanup in the Land of Enchantment, last week rejoined the private sector as executive director of the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association, the Albuquerque Journal reported. The 38 year-old Flynn, who resigned […]

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 […]