Publications: Weapons Cleanup Monitor

While nothing is certain in Congress, particularly in an election year, both houses have moved relatively swiftly during the current appropriations process. For the Energy Department, the House got things moving April 12, when its Appropriations energy and water subcommittee marked up a first draft of the fiscal 2017 spending legislation covering DOE. Since then, both the […]

The Senate’s proposal to pile more funding into the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site cleanup program has set the stage for a parochial tug-of-war over the agency’s fiscal 2017 legacy waste-cleanup budget, once House and Senate lawmakers gather to reconcile the differing spending bills they produced this month. The Senate’s proposed increase is for DOE’s Richland […]

Editor’s Note: DOE sub-agencies with excess facilities are required to maintain those facilities until the Environmental Management office assumes responsibility for them. An earlier version of this story said those sub-agencies were not required to pay for this maintenance. A Department of Energy report that will determine which of the agency’s excess nuclear facilities get torn down first […]

One of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board’s top concerns in the Department of Energy nuclear weapons complex is the potential for a thermal runaway incident in Area G, the hazardous waste storage area at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico. Although the risk may be somewhat mitigated by recent measures taken […]

The Energy Department and its contractor at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico could do more to ensure their new safety procedures prevent a repeat of a 2014 radiation release blamed on an improperly packaged drum of contaminated waste, according to the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB). “The Department of Energy […]

Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth marked a major cleanup milestone at the Department of Energy’s Portsmouth Site in Pike County, Ohio, taking out the final component of radio-contaminated process gas equipment from the X-326 facility, DOE said Wednesday. Fluor removed the last of more than 7,000 components on March 21, DOE said in a press release. Getting the […]

Battelle Memorial Institute, the Department of Energy contractor that recently abandoned a planned deep borehole nuclear waste storage field test in North Dakota, said Thursday that it is now considering a site in Spink County, S.D. The location would enable the company to explore nuclear waste storage methods in crystalline granite rock, according to a […]

Another senior official has departed the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico as of this week. John Tapia, LANL’s acquisition service management deputy division leader, according to his LinkedIn profile, managed a staff of 150 people with an annual operating budget of $16 million. He is no longer employed by the laboratory after a […]

K-27, the last of five gaseous diffusion plants to be demolished at the government’s Oak Ridge, Tenn., complex, appears to be coming down quicker than any of its predecessors (K-25, K-29, K-31, and K-33). That may be due to lessons learned from earlier demolitions, an increasingly experienced workforce, and/or an unusual period of mild winter […]

Retrieval of waste from the Hanford Site’s oldest double-shell tank resumed Thursday after workers gained some control over the internal leak in the container. As waste was being retrieved from Tank AY-102 early Sunday morning an alarm sounded, indicating the rate of leakage within the tank had increased dramatically. The decades-old tank was being emptied […]

Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS) on Monday officially exited a reduced work phase, or deliberate operations, that was implemented after the company wrapped up an operational safety pause last fall. Now, the Savannah River Site management and operations contractor is fully in enhanced operations. Work in enhanced operations is closer to normal operations, but contingencies […]

House and Senate spending bills produced this week would provide more money for legacy nuclear waste cleanup in fiscal 2017 than the White House requested, but quash administration proposals to dispose of weapon-grade plutonium in New Mexico and change the way the Department of Energy funds cleanup of former uranium enrichment sites. DOE’s Office of […]

Spending bills unveiled this week unambiguously torpedoed the White House’s plan to pay for cleanup of former uranium enrichment facilities with new mandatory spending and new fees on commercial nuclear power. The House and Senate proposals differ on how much to spend on these activities in fiscal 2017, but both chambers agreed the White House’s […]

Former Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) on Monday laid into a report commissioned by the Department of Energy’s lead MOX fuel facility contractor that questioned the suitability of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant as a storage site for downblended plutonium. In a commentary sent to media outlets, Domenici charged that CB&I AREVA MOX Services is using […]

Bechtel National of San Francisco earned $8.3 million in award fees from the Energy Department for its work last year on the Waste Treatment Plant (WTP) at the Hanford Site near Richland, Wash. — two-thirds of the total possible award, according to a document DOE’s Office of River Protection (ORP) published Monday. Most of the money […]

The Department of Energy is considering appealing U.S. Judge Rosanna Malouf Peterson’s order amending the Hanford Site consent decree, according to court documents requesting a transcript of Malouf Peterson’s closed-door discussions with a panel of three technical advisers. The federal agency is analyzing the court order and amended consent decree and believes the record of […]

Parsons said April 8 the Salt Waste Processing Facility it is building at the Energy Department’s Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C., received a Secretarial Department of Energy Award for Project Management Improvement on March 23. The award cites the project team’s innovative practices, which “positioned the project for the completion of construction activities ahead of the target date […]

South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson wants a faster resolution and no trial in the state’s pursuit of $100 million and the removal of plutonium from the Savannah River Site – both of which are stipulations dating to 2003 when South Carolina agreed to house the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) at the Department […]

The environmental cleanup of the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee has taken place over more than three decades, with much of the progress measured by improved water quality in a series of creeks and waterways – including White Oak Creek, which is the main drainage system for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. […]

Washington Closure Hanford has begun removing waste from vertically buried pipes at Hanford for the first time. Just two Hanford burial grounds, 618-10 and 618-11, used the disposal method for the pipes, called vertical pipe units. The two were saved as the last burial grounds in the river corridor for remediation because they were expected […]

Washington River Protection Solutions had removed well over a third of the sludge in the Hanford Site double-shell tank with an interior leak by midday Thursday. About 61,000 gallons of radioactive sludge had been retrieved, with an estimated 90,000 gallons remaining. Sludge retrieval got off to a slow start last month, with the Department of […]

A story in the March 17 issue of Weapons Complex Morning Briefing [“Hanford Master Procurement Plan Coming This Year”] should have said the Energy Department’s Office of Hanford Acquisitions oversees acquisitions for the department’s Richland Operations Office only. A story in the April 1 issue of Weapons Complex Monitor [“With Little Fanfare, Six Tons of […]

Discussions over missed deadlines and penalties at the Savannah River Site’s Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF) have been held since November, even though the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control (SCDHEC) said in December that talks were expected to wrap up in January. Construction of the facility is expected to be completed next […]

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley said Tuesday she still expects the Department of Energy to pony up $100 million for missing a plutonium disposition milestone at the Savannah River Site’s Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF). South Carolina sued the federal government on Feb. 9 because DOE had failed for more than a month to […]

The Department of Energy on Tuesday said it would this year offer another 10 bus tours of cleanup operations at the Hanford Site in Washington state, after the originally planned 15 tours were filled. The added tour dates at the former plutonium production site are Aug. 2, 3, 10, 16, 17, 24, 30, and 31, […]

One Lockheed Martin affiliate reaped more than $60 million in unallowable profits over four years under a dubiously permissible information technology subcontract with another Lockheed affiliate at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state, the DOE Inspector General’s Office said in an audit report released Wednesday. The internal DOE watchdog also warned the […]

Though none would commit outright to making a run at the work, most of the major partners on the Energy Department’s main liquid-waste cleanup contract at the Savannah River Site signaled interest in bidding on billions of dollars’ worth of follow-on work at the Aiken, S.C. facility. About a week after DOE released a draft request […]

The Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico should soon move into a new phase of its more than two-year effort to reopen for business, which remains on schedule for December, officials said Thursday. The transuranic waste storage facility near Carlsbad has been closed since a fire and subsequent, unrelated radiation release […]