Publications: Weapons Cleanup Monitor

Staff Reports WC Monitor 1/8/2015 The New Mexico Environment Department in a recent report said it found 421 instances of noncompliance by the Los Alamos National Laboratory with its state hazardous waste facility permit in fiscal 2015. That was up significantly from 76 instances of noncompliance reported the year before, 193 in fiscal 2013, and […]

Chris Schneidmiller WC Monitor 1/8/2016 The company carrying out the decontamination and decommissioning of the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant (PORTS) in Ohio is largely meeting Department of Energy rules for management of radioactive waste, according to the DOE Office of Enterprise Assessments (EA). The office also found that the department’s Portsmouth/Paducah Project Office provides “generally […]

Staff Reports WC Monitor 1/8/2016 The Hanford Site fiscal 2016 appropriation signed into law is $78.7 million more than requested by the Obama administration and is higher than the fiscal 2015 budget. It totals $2.3 billion. “The federal government has a legal and moral obligation to clean up Hanford, which is why I fight year […]

Staff Reports WC Monitor 1/8/2016 Another Hanford C Farm radioactive waste storage tank has been declared empty to regulatory standards, with work to continue on two additional C Farm tanks. The 2010 consent decree between Washington state and the Department of Energy required the last of the 16 Hanford C Farm tanks to be emptied […]

Staff Reports WC Monitor 1/8/2016 The Department of Energy lauded URS-CH2M Oak Ridge’s (UCOR) work as cleanup manager for the Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee for the final half of fiscal 2015 and awarded the contractor fees totaling about $4.5 million. The fees represent almost 96 percent of what was available in the maximum fee pool […]

Staff Reports WC Monitor 1/8/2016 Contractors at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge and Savannah River sites have joined together to tackle mercury cleanup problems. Anne Smith, a spokeswoman for URS-CH2M Oak Ridge (UCOR), DOE’s cleanup contractor for the Tennessee site, said the company has formed a mercury issues coordination team with Savannah River Remediation, […]

Staff Reports WC Monitor 1/8/2016 The Department of Energy is moving to begin containing and cleaning up a growing plume of hexavalent chromium in the regional aquifer under the Los Alamos National Laboratory. After nine years of slow but incremental attention to a complex hydrological puzzle, DOE Environmental Management officials drew up a draft environmental […]

Staff Reports WC Monitor 12/18/2015 The Department of Energy Inspector General’s Office faulted the Los Alamos Field Office for ineffective implementation of an issues management program during a five-year period starting in 2009. In a report issued on Dec. 7, the IG identified a number of deficiencies in the way the office has reported, addressed, […]

Staff Reports WC Monitor 12/18/2015 The Department of Energy is working aggressively to start emptying the Hanford Site’s double-shell Tank AY-102 by the state deadline of March 4, according to the technical program manager for the project. The tank, the oldest of Hanford’s 28 double-shell waste storage tanks, was discovered to be leaking waste from […]

Chris Schneidmiller WC Monitor 12/18/2015 The congressionally approved omnibus budget for fiscal 2016 would provide nearly $6 billion for remediation of legacy Department of Energy defense nuclear facilities across the nation. House lawmakers voted Friday morning 316-113 to approve the $1.15 trillion spending package, and the Senate quickly followed suit with a 65-33 decision. The […]

The Weapons Complex Monitor is beginning its annual holiday break and will return to your inboxes on Friday, Jan. 8. The Weapons Complex Morning Briefing will be published Monday through Wednesday next week, and we will publish special bulletins should any major news break in the interim.

Staff Reports WC Monitor 12/18/2015 The state of Washington and the Department of Energy each have told a federal judge that the others’ proposal for new consent decree milestones at the Hanford Site would lead to delays in the massive cleanup project. Responses to the sides’ revised proposals were due this week, after U.S. District […]

Chris Schneidmiller WC Monitor 12/18/2015 The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico might be able to resume nuclear waste storage operations using only one of two new ventilation systems planned to be installed in the underground facility, the Department of Energy said this week. The facility’s airflow was significantly curtailed following the February 2014 […]

Staff Reports WC Monitor 12/18/2015 The Department of Energy has determined there is no need for a new supplemental environmental impact statement (EIS) before a liquid form of highly enriched uranium is transported from Canada to the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C. Stakeholders, including nuclear watchdogs and congressmen, have called for an EIS before […]

Staff Reports WC Monitor 12/18/2015 The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management expects to need about 240 of the first-of-a-kind containers designed for storing some of the remote-handled transuranic wastes that have been processed and certified at the Transuranic Waste Processing Center in Oak Ridge but can’t be shipped to the Waste Isolation Pilot […]

Staff Reports WC Monitor 12/18/2015 The construction quality at the Hanford Site’s Waste Treatment Plant was satisfactory for the areas reviewed in an on-site visit in September, but some concerns remain, the Department of Energy Office of Enterprise Assessments said last week. The office reviews construction quality at the vitrification plant each quarter, varying the […]

WC Monitor 12/18/2015 IN DOE The Department of Energy has determined there is no need for a new supplemental environmental impact statement (EIS) before a liquid form of highly enriched uranium is transported from Canada to the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C. Stakeholders, including nuclear watchdogs and congressmen, have called for an EIS before […]

Staff Reports WC Monitor 12/11/2015 Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS) is looking to expedite the Savannah River Site’s environmental cleanup mission through the development of a public-private partnership. The partnership would team SRNS and the Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) with a public partner. Together, the collaborative would bring a 70,000-square-foot advanced manufacturing center to […]

Staff Reports WC Monitor 12/11/2015 A Department of Energy official confirmed that the transition of contractors at the Transuranic Waste Processing Center at Oak Ridge would be completed this week, with North Wind Solutions officially taking over responsibility for management and operations at 6 a.m. Friday. North Wind received the $123.9 million contract – with […]

Staff Reports WC Monitor 12/11/2015 Mark Whitney, the No. 2 officer in the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management, was the keynote speaker Wednesday at the Energy, Technology, and Environmental Business Association’s annual Business Opportunities Conference in Knoxville. He gave attendees – many of them contractors in the department’s cleanup programs – an overview […]

Staff Reports WC Monitor 12/11/2015 Officials at the Los Alamos National Laboratory have known more than two years that the facility would not meet a key deadline in a fence-to-fence cleanup of radioactive and hazardous waste that their predecessors agreed to more than a decade ago under a binding court-ordered consent decree. A settlement for […]

Staff Reports WC Monitor 12/11/2015 Bechtel National has reached at least the 80 percent mark for design, procurement, and construction of the buildings at the Hanford Site Waste Treatment Plant that will not deal with high-level radioactive waste, according to an update from the Department of Energy.  DOE and Washington state would like the Low-Activity […]

Chris Schneidmiller WC Monitor 12/11/2015 The Department of Energy’s Office of Enterprise Assessments (EA) this week said it is investigating an incident in which a worker at the Separations Process Research Unit decommissioning and demolition project suffered symptoms of heat stress. The Aug. 15 event raises questions about possible “deficiencies” by contractor URS Energy & […]

Staff Reports WC Monitor 12/11/2015 The Department of Energy’s Office of Enterprise Assessments (EA) has sent a letter of enforcement to Hanford Site services and infrastructure contractor Mission Support Alliance. The letter questions the contractor’s response to a May 2015 accident involving a crane rigger, but imposes no requirements on MSA. Steven Simonson, director of […]

Chris Schneidmiller WC Monitor 12/11/2015 Rock salt could be less effective than believed as a subsurface container for nuclear waste, according to new research from the University of Texas at Austin. Salt beds are already used for safe holding of low-level nuclear waste at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, and have been […]

Chris Schneidmiller WC Monitor 12/11/2015 Nuclear waste cleanup technology specialist Kurion on Tuesday announced its third acquisition in four years – Oxford Technologies, a robotic systems  maker based in the United Kingdom. Oxford Technologies provides expertise and technology for remote handling, complex plant assembly, and operations in irradiated areas. Its remote tools have been used […]

WC Monitor 12/11/2015 IN EM Workers have installed more than 5,400 steel bolts in the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico in the year since ground control operations resumed at the subterranean transuranic waste storage site, the Department of Energy said last week. The bolts are one element of the advancing program to increase […]