Publications: Weapons Cleanup Monitor

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 […]

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 […]