Publications: Weapons Cleanup Monitor

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.

Millions of dollars in fines are still possible over missed milestones at the Savannah River Site’s Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF), though South Carolina regulators will not confirm or deny if they’ll impose the penalties after nearly a year of meetings with the federal government on the issue. The Savannah River Site celebrated the facility’s […]

The manager of a former subcontractor for UCOR — the URS-CH2M conglomerate priming decontamination and decommissioning at the Energy Department’s Oak Ridge site near Oak Ridge, Tenn. — faces five years in prison and a $250,000 fine after pleading guilty to conspiracy to defraud the government, court documents filed July 18 show. Joseph Armes, manager […]

The Energy Department is creeping closer to implementing new safeguards that will allow the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s (LANL) Area G transuranic waste processing facility to resume full operations and continue treatment of the problematic waste stream that caused a radiation leak at the underground Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) two years ago. According to […]

Already months behind schedule, dress rehearsal waste-disposal operations at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., have been extended another two weeks due to unspecified equipment issues, an executive with the mine’s prime contractor said in a Thursday town hall meeting. Workers at the Department fo Energy transuanric wase storage site on June 1 […]

Personnel were ordered to leave a Hanford Site tank farm Wednesday morning and access was restricted after three workers reported smelling odors consistent with chemical vapors associated with tank waste. The incident occurred despite Hanford tank farm contractor Washington River Protection Solutions complying with a federal court order issued Tuesday in an effort to prevent […]

Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII) on Thursday reported lower earnings in its second quarter due to a favorable litigation settlement that inflated the bottom line a year ago, but the company’s operating results were still strong and earnings beat consensus estimates. Net income slid 15 percent to $133 million, $2.80 earnings per share (EPS), from $156 […]

Leidos on Thursday said it expects to close the transaction for Lockheed Martin’s Information Systems and Global Solutions (IS&GS) business on Aug. 16 and plans to pay its shareholders of record a special cash dividend. The company said the dividend would be $13.64 per share, which will amount to about a $1 billion payment, and is […]

Fluor Corp. missed its mark for second-quarter earnings Thursday, posting a profit of $102 million, or 72 cents a share, down almost 30 percent from a year ago on a pair of underperforming projects unrelated to the company’s nuclear decommissioning work for the Energy Department. Revenue in the three months ended June 30 was $4.9 […]

CH2M has paid almost $471,000 to the Department of Energy as part of a March 2013 agreement to settle civil and criminal allegations of time card fraud at the Hanford Site in Washington state. DOE may only spend the money on systems at Hanford that would detect or deter time card fraud and abuse. CH2M […]