Publications: Weapons Cleanup Monitor

Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth got only about 28 percent of its available award fee for the six months ended March 28, according to the award fee determination scorecard published this week for the Energy Department’s prime contractor for decommissioning and decontamination of the former gaseous diffusion plant in Pike County, Ohio. That was good for roughly $6.8 […]

A Wednesday presentation from the top cleanup official at the Energy Department’s Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) indicates DOE believes it will take another 19 years and $2.9 billion to clean up remaining legacy waste at the 70 year-old nuclear weapons lab — billions of dollars less than what the state of New Mexico wants devoted to […]

South Carolina and the Environmental Protection Agency have refused to give the Energy Department more time to close two liquid waste tanks at the Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C., and the parties are slated to meet in August in an attempt to resolve the deadlock, an EPA official said Tuesday. In a presentation Tuesday […]

The Energy Department is preparing for a scenario in which some portion of the transuranic waste now stored above ground at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M. remains above ground until next summer — six months after the mine’s scheduled, and now-imperiled, December reopening. That is according to a modification granted last […]

A presentation about the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) dropped at the last minute from the agenda of a Wednesday citizens meeting in Santa Fe, N.M., includes no mention that the underground transuranic waste facility will reopen in December, as the Energy Department has publicly pledged since February. According to the WIPP recovery presentation that was to be briefed Thursday to the Northern […]

Hanford Site tank farms contractor Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS) has cut back on work to prepare the A and AX tank farms for waste retrieval following the mandate that more work be conducted on supplied air respirators. The Hanford Atomic Metal Trades Council (HAMTC) on July 11 issued a stop work order inside all […]

Just before returning home to their districts to campaign during Congress’ annual summer recess, two House committees took up their version of legislation that would extend whistleblower protection to employees of federal contractors and federal grantees, and further wall off whistleblowers from retaliation by nestling the machinery for whistleblowing in the offices of agency inspectors […]

Buddhist monks will lead their annual walk to the Hanford Site to pray and beat a drum outside the 300 Area gate on Thursday. It is part of a two-week Pacific Northwest Interfaith Peace Walk organized by the monks of the Nipponzan Myohoji Buddhist temple on Bainbridge Island, Wash., as they call for abolition of […]

The Savannah River Site has not yet been submitted a request to restrict airspace to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) after about a month of workers spotting drones flying above key areas of the Department of Energy facility. A 10th sighting occurred Friday when workers witnessed an unmanned aircraft system (UAS) flying over the site’s […]

The Department of Energy (DOE) has submitted its informational memorandum on open emergency management deficiencies at defense nuclear facilities as part of the DOE’s implementation of its complex-wide emergency preparedness and response improvement program. The department has been developing its implementation plan since the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) recommended in 2014 that the […]

An article in the July 22 edition of Weapons Complex Monitor, “UCOR Gets 94 Percent of Award Fee For Six Months Ended March 31,” should have said workers discovered rainwater in an improperly sealed barrel of solid waste at the 6556 Area of DOE’s Oak Ridge site, and that this water was removed and treated […]

Among the few details released publicly about the changes contractor CH2M Plateau Remediation will make to its strategy for tearing down the Plutonium Finishing Plant at the Energy Department’s Hanford Site was tucked into a recent report by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, which says the company will now remove additional glove boxes before […]

The Energy Department on Thursday put out to bid 10 years of deactivation and cleanup work for the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, a former uranium enrichment facility in Kentucky that shut down in 2013. Along with that contract, DOE soft-started a smaller procurement for technical services at the Portsmouth Paducah Project Office, releasing on Thursday […]

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) believes there may be a legislative fix for the culture of whistleblower retaliation a congressionally chartered report last week said persists across the Energy Department’s nuclear complex. The McCaskill-authored S. 795, “a bill to enhance whistleblower protection for contractor and grantee employees,” passed the Senate by unanimous consent in May and […]

Two decades after the Environmental Restoration Disposal Facility (ERDF) opened at the Hanford Site, it has racked up impressive numbers, said Scott Sax, president of Washington Closure Hanford, on Wednesday as officials and workers gathered to mark the anniversary. Almost 18 million tons of waste material have been disposed of at the landfill for mixed […]

The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and three universities have been named new Energy Frontier Research Centers for radiochemistry research to support the Department of Energy’s cleanup program. The DOE Office of Science plans to award $40 million over four years to the national lab in Washington state and Florida State University, Ohio State University, and […]

Plans were announced this week to file a federal class action lawsuit against the Department of Energy to recover retirement benefits lost for hundreds of Hanford employees who were moved to Lockheed Martin Services as part of a largely failed economic development plan in 1996. Fluor took over as the primary contractor at Hanford that […]

The Energy Department has acknowledged that the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) may not be ready to reopen on Dec. 12 as planned, and the agency is now working to figure out exactly which activities are holding up the restart of operations at the nation’s only disposal site for the radio-contaminated material and equipment known as […]

The Energy Department and Hanford Site contractor CH2M Plateau Remediation have asked the Washington state Ecology Department for permission to uproot two drained waste tanks at the Plutonium Uranium Extraction Plant, according to a permit modification request dated July 11 and posted online Monday. The plant, known as PUREX, is located in the 200 East […]

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 […]