Publications: Weapons Cleanup Monitor

The state of Washington stepped up a lawsuit against the Energy Department and the prime contractor for the Hanford Site tank farm over worker exposure to chemical vapors by asking a federal judge Thursday to mandate protective gear and other safety measures around waste storage at the Department of Energy facility near Richland, Wash. Washington Attorney […]

AECOM subsidiary URS Energy & Construction has begun demolition of the G2 building at the Separations Process Research Unit in Niskayuna, N.Y., the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management said in a Monday press release. The Separations Process Research Unit, a Cold War-era plant used for researching the separation of plutonium from irradiated uranium that […]

The Savannah River Site in South Carolina has begun a process to restrict its airspace in response to the recent sightings of drones flying overhead. Due to the sensitivity of the matter, site officials won’t discuss further details, such as the individual steps in the process to restrict the airspace. In a note sent to […]

The Energy Department said Thursday it completed the reorganization of its Environmental Management (EM) bureaucracy this week, consolidating seven organizational stovepipes into three and bringing the office’s nine field centers under the management of new Washington-based field office czar Stacy Charboneau. Charboneau take the new position of associate principal deputy assistant secretary for the Field Office unit within […]

URS CH2M Oak Ridge landed an award of nearly $3.6 million for the six months ended March 31, good for 94 percent of the total available to the prime cleanup contractor for the Energy Department’s former uranium enrichment facilities near Oak Ridge, Tenn., according to the company’s latest award fee determination scorecard from DOE. In […]

Nuclear Watch New Mexico wants a federal judge to throw out the newly amended consent order governing cleanup of legacy nuclear waste at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, according to a Tuesday court filing. In an amended complaint to a lawsuit originally filed in May, NukeWatch asked U.S. District Court Judge Judith Herrera to dismiss […]

The Plutonium Finishing Plant at the Energy Department’s Hanford Site in Washington state now will be reduced to a covered concrete slab by Sept. 30, 2017 — one year later than planned — under a modification announced Thursday to the Tri-Party Agreement that governs cleanup of the former plutonium production facility. The delay has long […]

With the details of the work sought essentially unchanged from the draft solicitation issued in May, the Energy Department on Thursday released a final solicitation for a five-year contract to transport transuranic waste over the road to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M. The final request for proposals for a WIPP Transportation Services contract […]

Thursday passed without any word from the Department of Energy or its contractor on whether a major milestone in the resumption of transuranic waste storage at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Calrsbad, N.M., happened as scheduled. According to the the 12-month WIPP Integrated Baseline developed by DOE and WIPP prime Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP), workers […]

The United Kingdom expects to spend another £117 billion ($154 billion) on remediation of 17 of its oldest nuclear sites into the next century, according to the latest cost update issued Wednesday. That is down by about £1 billion from 2015, representing progress in cleanup over the past year, said Laurence Meehan, spokesman for the […]

Work continued at the Hanford Site tank farms this week after tank farm contractor Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS) honored a stop work order by requiring all work in those areas to be done on supplied air respirators. The Hanford Atomic Metal Trades Council (HAMTC) on Monday issued the stop work order to protect workers […]

An engineering test vessel for the Waste Treatment Plant (WTP) at the Energy Department’s Hanford Site arrived in Richland, Wash., near the former plutonium production plant Wednesday after a daylong barge ride from a supplier’s facility in Vancouver, Wash., the WTP prime said in a series of social media posts. The cylindrical 16-foot-diameter by 38-foot-tall […]

Dr. Abraham Van Luik, a senior physical scientist at the Energy Department who since 2010 led the Carlsbad Field Office’s International Repository Science Program, died July 9 in the remote town of Faywood, N.M., according to obituary notices posted online and a DOE spokesperson. Van Luik, who was born in the Netherlands and worked for […]

A permit modification essential for getting the Hanford site’s Waste Treatment Plant (WTP) in Richland, Wash., ready to treat low-level liquid radioactive waste in 2022 went out for public comment Monday. The modification would allow Bechtel National to install melting pots required for the Low-Activity Waste Facility (LAW) that is part of DOE’s strategy for […]

Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP) needs to provide more visible escape paths from the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) and improve the reliability of water supply for its fire suppression system, according to a report issued Friday by the Energy Department’s Office of Enterprise Assessments. “In most cases, NWP has effectively established and implemented fire protection […]

The Energy Department and its contractors are discussing amongst themselves different approaches to a series of safety procedures for treating the problematic stream of transuranic waste from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico that caused the 2014 radiation leak at the underground Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad. According to a June 10 […]

The Department of Energy looked the other way for decades while its contractors on major nuclear cleanup projects illegally intimidated or fired employees who raised safety concerns, according to a report published Thursday by the Government Accountability Office. “DOE has infrequently used its enforcement authority to hold contractors accountable for unlawful retaliation, issuing two violation […]

The Department of Energy has provided Washington state with a proposed plan requiring up to seven years of work to close the Hanford Site’s 324 Building, which sits above a highly radioactive spill. The plan was required to meet a Tri-Party Agreement milestone at the end of June to include the building in the Hanford […]

The downblending of 6 metric tons of plutonium at the Savannah River Site is expected to begin in September, with plans to complete the process over the next several years. The weapon-usable, non-pit plutonium is not part of the 34 metric tons of material that would be processed by the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility […]

Savannah River Site officials still don’t know who is behind the flying drones that have been spotted above the 310-square-mile facility near Aiken, S.C. There have been eight confirmed sightings of drones flying over the Department of Energy facility, with the most recent reported on Tuesday. “We continue to partner with federal, state, and local […]

Washington River Protection Solutions has offered to move work shifts in the Hanford Site tank farms to the Department of Energy facility’s Thursday-evening-through-Monday-morning weekend shifts or to night shifts in response to union demands. Fewer workers are on site during those hours to be exposed to possible chemical vapors. Mark Lindholm, president of the tank […]

As the Energy Department mulls how much of its legacy transuranic waste will have to be repackaged under the stricter new Waste Acceptance Criteria that went into effect at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) this week, the agency is quietly buying itself more time to deal with the problematic waste that caused the plant’s […]

About 45 non-manual workers at the Hanford Waste Treatment Plant will be told next week that their jobs are ending anytime from late August through October. The layoffs are part of a change in the mix of workers needed as the vitrification plant project “is reaching a transition point as we drive toward completing the […]

Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS) is seeking a dismissal of a federal lawsuit accusing the contractor and one of its parent companies of overcharging the government more than $5 million in “unallowable costs.” In papers filed on May 20, SRNS said the Department of Justice misused the Federal Claims Act in filing its lawsuit, and […]

Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS) has cleaned up a small mercury and tritium spill at the Savannah River Site’s Solid Waste Management Facility and is preparing the waste for disposition, a spokesperson for the Energy Department’s contractor said Friday. The spill was discovered by SRNS personnel during a routine walk of the Solid Waste Management […]

The final request for proposals for a contract to haul radio-contaminated material and equipment to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., will be released this month, no sooner than Sunday, the Energy Department said. The new WIPP Transportation Services contract will be a five-year, fixed-price, indefinite-quantity, indefinite-delivery deal. The pact will replace a pair […]

A subcontractor at Idaho National Laboratory (INL) broke a finger June 15 while performing routine maintenance on a heating, ventilation, and air conditioning system at the lab’s Energy Innovation Laboratory, an Energy Department spokesperson at the Idaho Falls facility said Monday. It was the second work accident involving a worker’s hand at Idaho in June — […]