Publications: Weapons Cleanup Monitor

As the Department of Energy’s motivated cleanup team tries to stabilize some of the worst of the worst situations at excess facilities at the Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee, a focal point appears to be the Alpha-4 facility located inside the high-security “Protected Area” of the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant. Besides dealing with a basement […]

In a court document released March 11, a federal judge scolded the Energy Department for trying to drag out a long-running lawsuit brought to settle cleanup deadlines for 56 million gallons of radioactive waste buried at a former plutonium production facility in Richland, Wash. The document was one of several released late last week after […]

The Energy Department’s top nuclear cleanup official on Tuesday warned lawmakers of soaring remediation costs in Washington state, and faced tough questions about the agency’s plan to find more bill payers for uranium enrichment cleanup in Kentucky and Ohio. The bombshell about escalating cleanup costs at DOE’s Hanford Site near Richland, Wash. — long foreseen but little discussed […]

Bechtel National has begun pouring the concrete basemat for a new facility that will do some of the work of the Hanford Site’s Waste Treatment Plant’s Pretreatment Facility a decade before it is expected to be operating. To start vitrifying low-activity waste at the Waste Treatment Plant as soon as 2022, the new Effluent Management […]

PHOENIX — The operator of the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina intends by the end of March to fully resume normal operations following a September 2015 safety incident that led the contractor to order a nearly company-wide suspension of work that lasted for two months. As work resumed in November, Savannah […]

The overwhelming number of excess facilities awaiting cleanup at Department of Energy facilities has been identified as one of the agency’s biggest challenges and concerns, and DOE’s Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management is using $28 million – a special fund enabled by a congressional plus-up for fiscal 2016 – to reduce risks and stabilize […]

PHOENIX — Major cleanup contractors working across the Energy Department’s weapons complex bemoaned contracting trends at DOE’s Office of Environmental Management that, they say, have made it harder to justify bidding on cleanup work. “I think there’s still a strong case, but I can tell you, it’s getting more and more difficult every day,” Kenneth Camplin, vice […]

PHOENIX — Christine Gelles, the Energy Department’s acting associate deputy assistant secretary for waste management, will retire from DOE on March 18 to join consulting and marketing shop Longenecker & Associates. “I will see you next time with just a different name tag, I hope,” Gelles, a 22-year DOE veteran three steps removed in the chain […]

Longstanding efforts to reduce the cost and time of cleaning up nuclear waste at the Savannah River Site and around the entire Environmental Management (EM) complex will require mature technology, according to SRS contractor Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS) and other Energy Department personnel. During a budget forum on March 3 near Aiken, S.C., a […]

PHOENIX — The Energy Department plans to release a draft solicitation for Savannah River Site liquid cleanup work worth between $1 billion and $3 billion by March 31, a senior DOE procurement official said here Wednesday. It is the first, and one of the largest, of several weapons complex cleanup solicitations and awards set for […]

PHOENIX — The Energy Department has almost finished tweaking an $11.4-billion contract with Bechtel National that will officially clear the San Francisco-based company to modify the Hanford Site Waste Treatment Plant (WTP) to begin treating low-level nuclear waste by 2022. Conceived more than 15 years ago to turn some 56 million gallons of chemical and radioactive […]

PHOENIX — Heavy equipment left over from a successful liquid-waste disposal operation at the West Valley Demonstration Project should be entombed in concrete in Texas by October, a DOE contractor said here Wednesday at the 2016 Waste Management Conference. Some 600,000 gallons of high-level liquid waste leftover from West Valley, the only U.S. site ever […]

The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., will be able to store about five shipments of transuranic waste a month after it reopens to new shipments later this year, but the prime contractor at the underground Energy Department facility said here that number could quickly double. “We hope to get it up to […]

PHOENIX — The public could get its first look at a new proposed consent agreement governing DOE cleanup of legacy nuclear waste at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) near Los Alamos, N.M. on March 30, a state official said here at the 2016 Waste Management Conference. “We’re targeting March 30 for the document to go up for […]

While concerns have been raised about the proposed location of the Department of Energy’s new CERCLA landfill in Oak Ridge, Tenn., a DOE contractor is continuing to work on design of the waste-disposal facility. The department is evaluating a number of sites on the government’s Oak Ridge Reservation because of concerns raised by environmental regulators […]

Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz was on the defensive this week in the first two congressional hearings of the year to dive deeply into his department’s budget request for legacy nuclear cleanup in fiscal 2017, with the White House’s proposal to change a long-established strategy for disposing of 34 metric tons of surplus, weapon-usable plutonium taking […]

A former employee of Energy Department contractor Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS) alleged the company bilked the federal government out of $20 million by covering up a leak in the double-shelled liquid-waste Tank AY-102 at the Hanford Site near Richland, Wash., according to a recently unsealed court documents. In a whistleblower complaint filed under seal in 2013 in […]

The Department of Energy and its tank farm contractor met their deadline to start emptying waste from double-shell Tank AY-102 with several thousand gallons of liquid removed by Thursday afternoon. “The state is pleased with the efforts of DOE and Washington River Protection Solutions to meet the terms of the settlement agreement, even starting waste […]

The Energy Department has received two more years to come up with a plan for sending transuranic waste stored at the Hanford Site near Richland, Wash., to New Mexico for permanent disposal, but the waste must still be shipped out by 2030, according to a recently formalized modification to the site’s master cleanup agreement. DOE, […]

Following up on remaining safety issues related to the hazardous waste repository at the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Area G, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board has announced plans to hold a public hearing in Santa Fe on March 22. In a prepared statement DNFSB Chairman Joyce Connery said, “With the upcoming wildfire season, the […]

The Energy Department said Tuesday it is taking applications for membership on the Nevada Site Specific Advisory Board, which provides citizen feedback about the agency’s ongoing nuclear operations and cleanup activities at the Nevada National Security Site. “Ideal candidates are private citizens living in communities near the [the site] who are willing to volunteer their […]

U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) said Wednesday that he will champion a change in law that would allow the Department of Energy to contract private companies in storing nuclear waste. The move would clear the way for DOE’s search for consent-based interim sites that would house spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste now stored […]

The Plutonium Finishing Plant is another step closer to being torn down after decades of work to clean out the heavily contaminated facility at the Hanford Site in Washington state. This week the Department of Energy announced that both of the 12-foot-tall glove boxes in the plant’s main processing building had been cut up, removed, […]

An article in the Feb. 12 edition of Weapons Complex Monitor, “Hanford Liquid Cleanup OK in Budget, but Big Cuts for Other Areas Proposed,” should have said: The total cost of the Hanford Waste Treatment Plant, including Bechtel’s $11.4 billion prime contract to build the facility, is $12.3 billion. The White House for 2017 requested […]

Moab uranium mill tailings remediation project contractor Portage Inc. earned 84 percent of its potential award fee for fiscal 2015, the Department of Energy said on Thursday. The $1.26 million fee came with a rating of “very good” for the year. The department’s Office of Environmental Management particularly lauded Portage’s work in recovering from a […]

With groundwater cleanup at the Energy Department’s Idaho Site progressing slower than expected, DOE is giving itself until September 2019 to test out some fixes, an agency official told members of an agency-chartered citizen group last week. That is according to slides Nicole Badrov, a senior DOE manager in Idaho, presented to the Idaho National […]

A worker at the Energy Department’s Hanford Site near Richland, Wash., on Jan. 21 plunged 4 feet into an old septic tank he was attempting to dig out of the ground to clear space for plumbing that eventually will pipe liquid waste out of leaky underground waste storage tanks. The man, a subcontractor for Hanford tank-farm […]