Amentum has been awarded £26 million ($35 million US) under a four-year contract to provide specialist services for the UK’s nuclear waste management association.
Amentum will be one of the suppliers on all four lots of the United Kingdom’s Integrated Waste Management Specialist Nuclear Services Framework, according to Amentum’s Tuesday’s press release.
Under the framework, Amentum will provide technical support, including topics such as waste management and sustainability, to Nuclear Waste Services’s Integrated Waste Management Delivery Team.
The Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory at Richland, Wash., has reportedly laid off an undisclosed number of employees due to budget cuts.
The layoff was first reported Thursday by the Tri-City Herald newspaper. The newspaper said Battelle National, which runs the lab for DOE, confirmed a small number of layoffs were made this week. The newspaper could not confirm the number of workers let go, but reported it was too few to trigger public workforce reduction notices required in Washington state.
“Battelle recently eliminated some vacant positions and offered a voluntary separation option to staff in certain operational areas,” according to a statement emailed to Exchange Monitor by a Battelle spokesperson. “Unfortunately, the necessary number of volunteers was not achieved, so Battelle has made the difficult decision to move forward with a limited number of involuntary separations.
A division of BWX Technologies has completed the expansion of its isotopes production capacity.
Kinectrics, based in Toronto, Canada, commissioned four new second generation electromagnetic isotope separator units, which is anticipated to increase its annual production capacity to over 500 grams of Ytterbium-176 by the end of the year, according to a BWXT Wednesday press release.
Ytterbium-176 is a precursor for Lutetium-177, which is a medical isotope used to treat prostate cancer. Kinectrics said the increased output can help over 150,000 patients annually.
Rep. Mike Simpson (R-ID) said in a Sept. 8 press release that provisions included in the House-passed version of the Energy & Water Appropriations fiscal 2026 bill would benefit the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory (INL).
The legislation that passed the House 214-to-213 would fund INL’s continuing research into advanced tri-structural isotropic (TRISO) and high-assay low enriched uranium (HALEU) reactor fuel, Simpson said. The appropriations bill would also support infrastructure and operations including the Microreactor Application Research Validation and Evaluation (MARVEL) project and the Demonstration of Microreactor Experiments (DOME) Test Bed.
No counterpart energy and water appropriations measure has passed the Senate yet. Congress is currently working on some type of stopgap continuing resolution to keep government operations from shutting down Sept. 30.