Publications: Weapons Cleanup Monitor

Seven states and a national trade association filed legal briefs this week urging the Eleventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to leave in place a Georgia federal judge’s national order blocking the Joe Biden administration from enforcing its COVID-19 vaccination mandate for contractors. The legal arguments were filed Tuesday by Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC) […]

The U.S. House of Representatives Tuesday approved a three-week stopgap funding plan to keep the federal government open through March 11 after the current continuing resolution expires on Feb. 18. The full House voted Tuesday evening  272-to-162 to approve the short-term extension while appropriators continue to work on a spending plan to carry the government […]

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management has hauled away the last of demolition debris from buildings torn down last year at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory site in Southern California, according to a Tuesday release. Trucks carrying the waste from buildings within DOE’s Energy Technology Engineering Center northwest of Los Angeles rolled out […]

The Department of Energy’s latest best- and worst-case estimates for fully cleaning up the Hanford Site in Washington State were each several tens of billions of dollars lower than the previous estimate, though the calculation released this week does not fully include the cost of delays to the site’s crucial High-Level Waste Facility. The feds […]

Six employees at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory who refused COVID-19 vaccine are assured of their day in court after obtaining a right to sue from a federal agency, the judge in the case confirmed this week. The six plaintiffs filed an amended complaint Jan. 4 against the University of Tennessee- Battelle partnership (UT-Battelle) operating […]

More than two-dozen firms sent multiple representatives to attend virtual meetings last week on the Department of Energy’s potentially $5.87-billion Decontamination and Decommissioning Contract at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio, according to a list published this week.  Parties sending people to virtual sessions on a follow-on contract to clean up the former gaseous diffusion uranium […]

Incumbent North Wind Portage beat out six other small business rivals to win a potentially 10-year, $614-million Moab Remedial Action Contract for cleaning up uranium mill tailings in Utah, the Department of Energy announced Thursday. Idaho-based North Wind Portage holds the existing $197-environmental remediation contract that started in October 2016 and was scheduled to run […]

A three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals Eleventh Circuit will hear oral arguments April 8 on a nationwide order enjoining the Joe Biden administration from enforcing its COVID-19 vaccine mandate for most workers employed by federal contractors. The hearing in Atlanta, formally scheduled in an online order posted Wednesday, will consider whether to […]

In recent public statements, the two South Carolina Republicans in the Senate sounded receptive to the idea of President Joe Biden nominating a federal judge from their state, U.S. District Court Judge Michelle Childs, to the U.S. Supreme Court.   At the same time, however, some labor unions told The Washington Post recently Childs is not […]

Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), who has taken an active interest in Department of Energy facilities in New Mexico,  has been hospitalized after suffering a stroke, but should make a full recovery, his office staff said in a Twitter posting on Tuesday. In an article citing senior aides to the lawmaker, The Santa Fe New […]

The Government Accountability Office has denied a protest by a group called Oak Ridge Environmental Partners that challenged the Department of Energy’s  $8.3-billion Cleanup Contract issued in October to United Cleanup Oak Ridge, a team led by Amentum and Jacobs, the current incumbents at the Tennessee site. A Government Accountability Office (GAO) notice dated Tuesday […]

In a milestone for U.S. nuclear-weapons cleanup in Washington State, the Department of Energy since Jan. 26 has prepared 50,000 gallons of liquid radioactive waste at the Hanford Site for solidification into stable, storable glass as soon as December 2023. By the end of the year, DOE and its contractors hope the new Tank Side […]

The Department of Energy and the prime for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico last month brought online the 700-C underground ventilation fan not used regularly since the 2014 accident that forced the disposal site out of service for about three years. Reinhard Knerr, manager of DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office that oversees the […]

Unlike many other federal agencies, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board did not receive any supplemental funding during fiscal 2021 to ensure emergency operations during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a financial report released Monday. While the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) kept running without money from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security […]

The Department of Energy’s prime contractor for the Savannah River Site has agreed to a plan with federal and South Carolina regulators for final cleanup of a 25-mile stretch of radiologically contaminated stream. The affected area includes the Lower Three Runs stream, which begins near the center of the federal complex near the Georgia line, […]

On Jan. 21, a federal court in Texas temporarily blocked the Joe Biden administration’s requirement that federal employees be vaccinated against COVID-19 as a condition of employment. In the decision, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Vincent Brown in the Southern District of Texas ruled against the administration’s vaccine policy, which stems from executive orders issued by […]

The Department of Energy’s $7.5-billion nuclear cleanup office appears to be inching closer to a small business solicitation for Technical Assistance Contracts for three or more field sites, according to a procurement website that went online within the past week. The Office of Environmental Management (EM) previously said in a Dec. 27 notice to expect […]

A U.S. district judge in Georgia, who last month blocked the Joe Biden administration from enforcing a COVID-19 vaccine mandate aimed at government contractors, declined Jan. 21 to wade into issues surrounding contractors that on their own require workers to be inoculated. At the same time, U.S. District Judge Stan Baker in the Southern District […]

The Salt Waste Processing Facility, offline since late October at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina, should resume operation within a couple of weeks, an executive with Parsons Corp., which built the plant told an advisory panel Tuesday. “We are shut down currently,” Mike Pittman, a Parsons vice president and project […]

In addition to claiming more than 800,000 American lives, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused “massive economic disruptions in the public and private sector,” which bolsters the case for requiring most employees of federal contractors to be vaccinated, U.S. government attorneys said in a brief filed with the Eleventh U.S. Court of Appeals in Atlanta. The […]

North Wind Dynamics is poised to start a $135-million contract in charge of Infrastructure Services at the Department of Energy’s Portsmouth Site in Ohio. North Wind is “currently in transition” and will officially become the services contractor on Feb. 18, a company spokesperson said via email Wednesday. A DOE contract chart updated last week shows […]

Despite some court setbacks for federal vaccination orders, a top manager with the Department of Energy’s Jacobs-led cleanup contractor at the West Valley Demonstration Project in New York said Wednesday his organization is sticking with its COVID-19 vaccination mandate. “We have actually chosen to maintain that mandate,” CH2M HILL BWXT West Valley’s president and general […]

Local governments and school boards are working with a Washington, D.C.-based interest group to ensure the two highly-contaminated nuclear sites in their areas receive Payments in Lieu of Taxes in the fiscal 2023 budget request the Joe Biden administration sends to Congress in several weeks. The locals, with support of the Energy Communities Alliance (ECA), […]

The Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina should be ready to start shipping certain transuranic waste from downblended plutonium to its underground disposal site in New Mexico by the end of the summer, an agency official told the Savannah River Site Citizens Advisory Board Tuesday. The Savannah River Site (SRS) goal is […]

Hundreds of federal and contract workers at the Department of Energy’s nuclear cleanup wing continue to test positive weekly, but at least for this week, the figures have retreated from their recent peak. There were 560 confirmed cases of COVID-19 among members of the DOE Office of Environmental Management (EM), a spokesperson wrote Thursday in […]

The Department of Energy did not reject any information requests from the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board for the six-months ending Dec. 31, the safety watchdog told Congress this month, which amounts to zero refusals during the first year of the Joe Biden administration. “The Board has no denials of access to information to report […]

At industry’s recommendation, the Department of Energy now says a bidder’s technical and management approach will count more than past performance in a competition for the next depleted uranium hexafluoride and site support contract at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio and the Paducah Site in Kentucky. But the bidder’s key personnel remain the most important […]

At least one prospective candidate for a vacancy in the U.S. Supreme Court has first-hand experience with litigation concerning the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons complex. National media, including The Washington Post and the Associated Press, have reported U.S. District Court Judge Julianna Michelle Childs of South Carolina is on the shortlist of those expected […]