Publications: Weapons Cleanup Monitor

Department of Energy management at the Hanford Site is not doing enough about a leak from a single-shell, high-level waste tank made public in April 2021, according to a Washington state lawmaker and some other members of the Hanford Advisory Board. Hanford bosses and the Washington state Department of Ecology lack a sense of urgency […]

Since the confirmed, domestic start of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management has confirmed 7,916 cases of the illness among the agency’s workforce, a spokesperson said Thursday. Likewise, the latest weekly total of confirmed cases is 313, a whopping jump of 242 since the office’s last weekly […]

With litigation on a controversial contract award two years ago still ongoing, the Department of Energy has extended incumbent Swift & Staley as the landlord services provider at the Paducah Site in Kentucky through February, a spokesperson confirmed via email this week. Without the extension, first revealed in a U.S. Court of Federal Claims order, […]

As of mid-December, the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., had received 210 shipments of defense-related transuranic waste in 2021, beating the 2020 total of 192 shipments before the calendar year was out, according to the deep-underground repository’s website. In November alone, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) received 27 shipments […]

The Department of Energy has picked up the first two-year option in its agreement with HPM Corp., the incumbent provider of occupational medical services to thousands of federal and contractors at the Hanford Site in Washington state. The three-year base period of the potential seven-year, $152-million contract with Kennewick. Wash.,-based HPM Corp. (HPMC), was due […]

The new management team is in place at the Idaho National Laboratory, according to the Idaho Environmental Coalition’s website. The change was effective Jan. 1. The Idaho Environmental Coalition (IEC) has a potential ten-year, $6.4 billion contract and took  over from Fluor Idaho.  Ty Blackford is the president and program manager at the new team, […]

Nuclear Waste Partnership, the Amentum-BWX Technologies team that runs the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, won 62% of its subjective fee for fiscal year 2021 and 72% of its overall fee, according to a Dec. 30  scorecard from the Department of Energy. The contractor took home about $3.3 million out of a potential […]

Over time, prominent historical figures such as Danish physicist Niels Bohr and New York Yankee catcher Yogi Berra are said to have warned us that predictions are tough to make, especially about the future. So despite the obvious challenges of prognostication, Weapons Complex Monitor will open the year with a few observations about some big […]

The top fed at the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management expects the Tank-Side Cesium Removal project at the Hanford Site in Washington state to begin operating “within weeks.” Office of Environmental Management (EM) senior adviser William (Ike) White made the comment Monday during an online meeting of the chairs of the chairs of […]

The Department of Energy’s cleanup branch announced this week that Joel Bradburne is the new field office manager at the Portsmouth-Paducah Project Office, after acting as the top boss for operations in Ohio and Kentucky since Robert Edwards retired at the end of July. “In this role he will oversee the deactivation and demolition of […]

Following a nationwide injunction blocking contractors for the Department of Energy and other agencies from ordering workers to be vaccinated against COVID-19 to keep their jobs, several other vaccine lawsuits against specific DOE sites are shifting to federal appeals courts, legal filings this week show. In the matter of the nationwide injunction, the Justice Department […]

More than 90% of the federal employees and contract workers at the Department of Energy’s nuclear cleanup branch have now been vaccinated against COVID-19, with more than 2,000 apparently still not taking the shot. “The vast majority of our [Environmental Management] EM workforce is vaccinated,” a spokesperson for the DOE Office of Environmental Management said […]

The top federal manager at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site said this week that cleanup of the Plutonium Finishing Plant is basically finished, while a nuclear boss with the Washington Department of Ecology indicated there is a general agreement about future remediation needs at the former plutonium production hub. Those were a couple of […]

With about a month to go before the Department of Energy planned return-to-work, about 60% of a 10,000-strong workforce at the Hanford Site in Washington state was on premises each day, site manager Brian Vance told the Hanford Advisory Board this week. While the DOE on Dec. 3 rolled out a plan to get most […]

More than 90% of the workers for CH2M HILL BWXT West Valley were vaccinated prior to a Dec. 8 deadline set by the contractor at the West Valley Demonstration Project site in New York state, deputy general manager Kelly Wooley told an online Citizen Task Force meeting Wednesday night.  As a result, federal court orders […]

Weapons Complex Monitor will not publish on Dec. 24 in observance of the Christmas holiday or on Dec. 31 in observance of the New Year’s holiday. Look for the next issue in your inbox on Monday, Jan. 3. Happy holidays!

A Department of Energy policy from 2019 that found certain less-risky high-level radioactive waste can be treated and disposed of as low-level waste was, on further review, upheld by Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, the agency said Thursday. To that end, DOE on Wednesday issued a Federal Register notice affirming that this altered interpretation of […]

A federal judge in Georgia this week blocked the Joe Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for contractors, almost exactly three months after Biden issued an executive order requiring shots for workers doing the government’s business. Most prime contractors at Department of Energy defense-nuclear sites had had their contracts modified to include a vaccine mandate well […]

Two years into the pandemic, the Department of Energy could see most of its federal employees return to their pre-COVID-19 work locations by mid-February, according to a Dec. 3 email message from agency leadership. The current “maximum telework” policy for DOE’s federal workforce will be phased out starting Jan. 18, Tarak Shah, chief of staff […]

Prospective bidders on the Department of Energy’s multibillion-dollar Hanford Integrated Tank Waste Disposition Contract in Washington state need not submit proposals before Christmas after all, thanks to an extension announced recently. The deadline for submitting bid proposals on the potential $45-billion contract is being extended by 17 days to Jan. 6, 2022, from Dec. 20, […]

Oak Ridge Environmental Partners, the same venture that last month challenged the Department of Energy’s issuance of the new Cleanup Contract, potentially worth $8.3 billion, at the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee, protested the contract again. A notice dated Dec. 3 on the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) website showed another protest of the contract issued […]

ALEXANDRIA, VA. – Department of Energy officials kicked off the National Cleanup Workshop here this week by praising the Office of Environmental Management and its contract workers for continuing remediation of nuclear site remediation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, in a pre-recorded message, thanked Environmental Management (EM) workers for “going into […]

ALEXANDRIA, VA. — The demolition of the massive X-326 Process Building, which began in the spring, is underway and should be finished in summer 2022, an executive with the decommissioning contractor at the Department of Energy’s Portsmouth Site in Ohio said at a conference here this week. “We are off to a very good start […]

ALEXIANDRIA, VA — The Department of Energy expects a new ventilation system at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico to come online between 2024 and 2026, the manager of the agency’s Carlsbad field office told Weapons Complex Monitor here this week. The agency’s Office of Environmental Management expects its rebaselining of the cost […]

ALEXANDRIA, VA. — During an address this week to the National Cleanup Workshop here, Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.) touched upon everything from Congress averting a government shutdown to the need for a new disposal site for nuclear debris at the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee. “We are either going to pass a budget or get […]

A compromise version of the National Defense Authorization Act, passed Tuesday by the House and awaiting a vote in the Senate at deadline Friday, would authorize funding for Department of Energy nuclear waste programs at the requested level for fiscal year 2022. In the bill, DOE’s Office of Environmental Management would get the requested $6.84 […]

With virtually all federal employees mandated to be vaccinated against COVID-19, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board envisions a staff return-to-workplace date of Jan. 24, a spokesperson for the board said this week. “[P]lans may change, but this is our current plan,” Tara Tadlock, the associate director for board operations at the Defense Nuclear Facilities […]