The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) cut the ribbon on the recently completed John A. Gordon Albuquerque Complex: a replacement for the 1950s era facilities that house around 1,200 employees and contractors and is sometimes called NNSA Headquarters West.
NNSA Administrator Jill Hruby and Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) attended the ceremony, the agency wrote in a press release this week. Other VIPs were also on hand. NNSA named the new complex after Gordon, the agency’s administrator, in 2021, the year after Gordon died. The new cost between $100 million and $250 million, NNSA has estimated.
The Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., took delivery of large high efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filter housings intended for the Surplus Plutonium Disposition project, site prime Savannah River Nuclear Solutions wrote in a press release.
The Surplus Plutonium Disposition program is the NNSA’s replacement for the canceled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility. The agency plans to dilute 34 metric tons of surplus, weapon-usable plutonium, mix it with concrete-like grout at Savannah River and ship it to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico for disposal deep underground.
NNSA said agency representatives were scheduled to be in Vienna the week of April 25 to host a side session at the International Atomic Energy Agency’s First International Conference on Nuclear Law: The Global Debate.
Those interested in the main conference can register online. The U.N.’s atomic energy agency said there will be a livestream available.
Los Alamos National Laboratories employees who sued the lab’s management and operations contractor over its strict COVID-19 vaccine mandate want a federal judge to reopen their case and allow their claim to proceed before a single arbitrator, according to an April 8 court filing.
The court had previously declined to stay the lab’s vaccine mandate, which like others handed down at DOE sites last year required contractors either to get vaccinated, get a medical exemption, which was treated like disability, or get a religious exemption, which was leave without pay —leave that could last so long that lab policy allowed the contractor to hire a replacement for someone with a religious exemption.
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California is looking for off-site commercial office space for about 150 people, the younger of the nation’s two nuclear-weapons labs wrote in a procurement note posted online this week.
Among other things, the lab wants a five-year lease, and to move in by September, according to the note.
Editor’s note, April 25, 2022, 11:08 a.m. Eastern time. The story was corrected to show that the Savannah River Site took delivery of HEPA equipment for the Surplus Plutonium Disposition program.
