Publications: Weapons Cleanup Monitor

The head of the new prime at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico aims to meet the Department of Energy and dispose of 400 shipments of transuranic waste at the site in 2023. Ken Harrawood, president and project manager for Bechtel’s Salado Isolation Mining Contractors, told a Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) Public […]

With the exception of a couple of projects at Europe’s largest and most complex nuclear site, the United Kingdom’s short-term cleanup goals for radioactive waste cleanup remain largely on target, the country’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority said in its mid-2023 fiscal year report, published Friday. Timelines for certain cleanup projects at Sellafield Limited, a Nuclear Decommissioning […]

Atomic Energy of Canada Limited is proceeding with previously-announced plans to seek bidders seeking to run Canadian Nuclear Laboratories, the federal Crown corporation said March 31. Canadian National Energy Alliance, an SNC-Lavalin-led team with Jacobs and Fluor as minority partners, currently runs daily operations of Canada’s national labs under a 10-year contract set to expire […]

An investigative office within the Department of Energy is looking into a December 2022 accident at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina that resulted in an employee of the prime contractor having a finger amputated. The enforcement unit within DOE’s Office of Enterprise Assessments told Savannah River Nuclear Solutions president and CEO Stuart MacVean […]

A few days before Christmas, the Department of Energy, together with the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency agreed to the broad framework for completing radioactive tank waste cleanup at the Savannah River Site. The primary goal of the revised Federal Facility Agreement, announced Tuesday, is to […]

Following a December court decision, the Department of Energy is officially canceling the solicitation that resulted in incumbent Swift & Staley winning — and then eventually losing — a new set-aside contract two years earlier for landlord services at the Paducah Site in Kentucky. “DOE has determined that canceling this solicitation is in the best […]

The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board is still looking for a successor to its first executive director of operations, who left in August, the board said in a recent report to Congress. “The board is actively recruiting to fill that vacancy in 2023,” according to the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board’s 33rd Annual Report to […]

Valerie McCain, the Bechtel project manager in charge of building the Department of Energy’s multibillion-dollar waste vitrification plant at the Hanford Site in Washington state, died unexpectedly, the company announced this week. “It is with great sadness that we share the news that Valerie McCain, project director of the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant and […]

A U.S. appeals court recently upheld a nation-wide injunction against President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 vaccination mandate for most federal workers. The ruling 10-6 ruling on March 23 from a majority of judges on the New Orleans-based U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, who heard oral arguments in September, upheld the January 2022 preliminary injunction issued […]

The Department of Energy Office of Environmental Management has issued stopgap extensions to avoid lapses in nuclear cleanup work this week at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio and treatment of a uranium enrichment byproduct there, and at the Paducah Site in Kentucky. Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth and Atkins-led Mid-America Conversion Services will both receive contract extensions of […]

The Department of Energy will temporarily suspend some work to contain underground hexavalent chromium contamination at the Los Alamos National Laboratory while talks continue with New Mexico officials over the effectiveness of the treatment, officials said Wednesday night. The agency’s local Environmental Management field office and its site cleanup contractor will halt injection of clean […]

Perma-Fix, Atlanta, closed out a tough 2022 with bigger losses and less revenue than a year ago, but the ill-effects of COVID-19 on the company’s business tapered off last year, the chief executive officer said last week. “While 2022 was a challenging year due to the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, which delayed projects […]

The Department of Energy is giving interested bidders two extra weeks to submit proposals for the new Occupational Medical Contract at the Hanford Site in Washington state, according to a procurement notice published this week. Response to the partial request for proposals that came out last month are now due April 24 rather than the […]

The Department of Energy considers 2,000 gallons of tank waste earmarked for the test-bed initiative at the Hanford Site in Washington state to be low-level radioactive waste and not high-level waste, the agency wrote in a Federal Register notice published this week. The notice, officially the final Waste Incidental to Reprocessing Determination, which is now […]

New Mexico’s public misgivings about nuclear waste is worrisome in Washington state where the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site is expected to become a big shipper to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in a few years and finish around 2050, a Hanford community representative said this week. “There is one item that is hitting our […]

The Department of Energy said this week crews have fixed the cause of the recent leak at the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit at the Idaho National Laboratory and should start running the facility soon with a mixture of 90% simulant and 10% radioactive sodium-bearing waste. Integrated Waste Treatment Unit (IWTU) crews on Tuesday “completed key […]

WASHINGTON, D.C. — After a congressional hearing Thursday, Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said the Department of Energy thinks the startup of the waste vitrification plant at the Hanford Site in Washington will not slip too much further into the future. “I think we have a handle on it,” Granholm told the Monitor about big […]

The procurement center for the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental holds its first so-called “Reverse Industry Day,” online in May, a move sought by the Government Accountability Office. The virtual Reverse Industry Day is scheduled for 1 p.m. Eastern Time on May 4, according to a Monday notice from the DOE Environmental Management Consolidated […]

A group of current and former Department of Energy contractors at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio are again targets of a federal lawsuit, this one filed by a plaintiff suffering from cancer who attended a now-shuttered middle school near the former gaseous diffusion plant. Christian Rose, diagnosed in June with Burkitt Lymphoma, a cancer of […]

The Department of Energy has a nickname: “the Department of Everything,” the acting DOE nuclear cleanup boss told weapons complex citizen advisory board chairs this week.   The DOE Office of Environmental Management senior adviser William (Ike) White retold the joke during a Washington, D.C., meeting Tuesday. The description applies to an agency involved in issues […]

The Department of Energy could spend $20 million on tearing down contaminated old facilities at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California during fiscal 2024, or about $15 million less than what Congress approved for that purpose in fiscal 2023, according to the White House budget justification out last week. The DOE Office of Environmental […]

Bechtel National earned more than $6.5 million, or 83% of its total potential fee, for Department of Energy work in 2022 on the long-anticipated Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant at the Hanford Site in Washington state. Overall, the company earned $6.53 million out of a potential $7.87 million in fee for the calendar year ended […]

The 1,200 or so employees at the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management will almost-certainly be retired by the time the Hanford Site in Washington state is fully cleaned up, based upon the budget request issued last week by the White House. The acting boss for Environment Management, said last fall the nuclear cleanup […]

The federal watchdog for Department of Energy nuclear defense sites continues to pursue “an aggressive staffing plan” initiated over the past two years to make up for workforce brain-drain, according to an agency budget justification document issued last week. For fiscal year 2024, the administration of President Joe Biden (D) requested $47.2 million for the […]

WASHINGTON, D.C. — After a congressional hearing Thursday, Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said the Department of Energy thinks the startup of the waste vitrification plant at the Hanford Site in Washington will not slip too much further into the future. “I think we have a handle on it,” Granholm told the Monitor about big […]

Workers at the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., are roughly halfway through sinking a new underground utility shaft, site managers said Thursday. Shaft-sinking crews recently surpassed the midway point at 1,076-feet deep, the DOE and its new prime contractor, Bechtel affiliate Salado Isolation Mining Contractors, said in a March 9 […]

Work continues on transfer of the Savannah River Site landlord authority to the Department of Energy’s semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration, the top cleanup fed at the South Carolina complex told a DOE advisory panel this week. A joint team of DOE Office of Environmental Management and National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) representatives should issue […]