Department of Energy

The Department of Energy announced Monday that it has selected a new Savannah River Site manager to replace Jack Craig, is retiring after three years in the role and 32 years of federal service. Retired U.S. Navy Capt. Michael Budney will take over at the 310-square-mile site near Aiken, S.C. While serving for nearly three […]

The U.S. Energy Department has agreed to a $24 million legal settlement to resolve breach of contract litigation brought by Centrus Energy in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. The settlement agreement was reached Jan. 11, and Centrus reported the development on Jan. 17 in an 8-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. […]

The Trump administration’s nominee for assistant secretary of energy for environmental management, Anne Marie White, is taking private one-on-one meetings with senators prior to an expected hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, an industry source said Thursday. “She started her Senate rounds this week,” said the source, who said he did not know how […]

Environmental Management (EM) missions at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina are in line to receive $287 million more in the next federal budget than they received in fiscal 2017, with a strong emphasis on liquid waste cleanup. President Donald Trump’s fiscal 2019 budget proposal, released Monday, would provide $1.66 billion […]

The Trump administration is again proposing to increase the budget for the Energy Department’s nuclear cleanup office, to $6.6 billion for fiscal 2019. That would be $182 million above the fiscal 2017 enacted level and $100 million above the amount proposed for the current budget year for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management (EM). Two industry […]

The Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico would get a funding spike to $403 million in the Trump administration fiscal 2019 budget request, which envisions the underground disposal site taking 10 shipments weekly. The budget proposal for the Carlsbad Field Office would be $79 million over the 2017 enacted level of spending […]

President Donald Trump’s defense-heavy budget request would have mixed effects at the Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee. Trump has made no secret of his desire to increase military-related spending. Toward that, the White House proposal for fiscal 2019 would provide $15.1 million for the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration, the Department of Energy’s stockpile steward, […]

South Carolina stakeholders for the Savannah River Site denounced Monday a potential plan to process 34 metric tons of plutonium and ship it to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., for permanent storage. That “dilute and dispose” option is the Department of Energy’s preferred approach for eliminating the plutonium, rather than continuing forward with construction and […]

The U.S. Department of Energy has as of Tuesday incurred $3.2 million in fines from the state of Idaho for failure to successfully start operating the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit (IWTU) at the Idaho National Laboratory. The federal agency has paid part of that amount, primarily through environmental cleanup projects in the state, but the […]

It might take until March for the U.S. Government Accountability Office to explain its recent rulings in two protests against a $4.7 billion liquid waste management contract at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina. The agency on Feb. 8 upheld one protest and rejected another, but has not released the decisions. […]

The Energy Department expects in April to file a permit application for storage of radioactive and chemically hazardous waste at its Separations Process Research Unit (SPRU) cleanup in upstate New York. A total of 22 containers are expected to hold waste generated by ongoing environmental remediation at the site, according to a recent DOE notice. […]

Members of the Pacific Northwest congressional delegation are prepared to fight a $230 million budget cut for the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state. If approved by Congress, funding for cleanup of the former plutonium production complex would drop to roughly $2.185 billion in the DOE fiscal 2019 budget proposal issued Monday. The […]

The number of workers with positive bioassay results has increased to seven since the spread of radioactive contamination was discovered in mid-December at the Hanford Site Plutonium Finishing Plant demolition zone. The seven workers are in addition to 31 workers discovered to have ingested or inhaled radioactive particles after a June spread of contamination during […]

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) needs more funding in fiscal 2019 for licensing Yucca Mountain in Nevada as a nuclear waste repository, mostly to put more full-time people on the project, the independent nuclear-waste regulator said in its budget request this week. In a roughly $970-million request for the budget year starting Oct. 1, the […]

The Energy Department expects in April to file a permit application for storage of radioactive and chemically hazardous waste at its Separations Process Research Unit (SPRU) cleanup in upstate New York. A total of 22 containers are expected to hold waste generated by ongoing environmental remediation at the site, according to a recent DOE notice. […]

The Energy Department is at risk of missing the 2018 deadline to ship all transuranic waste at the Idaho National Laboratory out of the state, a senior official said recently. That comes even as the agency has increased its pace of shipments to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico for permanent disposal, Energy […]

The U.S. Department of Energy has as of Tuesday incurred $3.2 million in fines from the state of Idaho for failure to successfully start operating the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit at the Idaho National Laboratory. The facility is intended to process 900,000 gallons of liquid sodium-bearing waste produced during Cold War-era spent fuel reprocessing at […]

The Department of Energy will not release its detailed budget request for fiscal 2019 until sometime within the next two weeks. That is according to a Tuesday message from a Department of Energy (DOE) official reviewed by Weapons Complex Morning Briefing. The official also said the annual “budget in brief,” a summary that might or […]

South Carolina stakeholders for the Savannah River Site denounced Monday a potential plan to process 34 metric tons of plutonium and ship it to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., for permanent storage. That “dilute and dispose” option is the Department of Energy’s preferred approach for dealing with the plutonium, rather than continuing forward with construction […]

The Energy Department has agreed to a $24 million legal settlement with Centrus Energy to resolve breach of contract litigation the company had filed in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. The settlement agreement was reached Jan. 11, and Centrus reported the development on Jan. 17 in an 8-K filing with the U.S. Securities and […]

Environmental Management (EM) missions at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina are in line to receive $287 million more in the next federal budget than they received in fiscal 2017, with a strong emphasis on liquid waste cleanup. A budget justification detailing specific funding lines for President Donald Trump’s fiscal 2019 […]

Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) is continuing to take aim at the Energy Department’s practice of bartering excess uranium for cleanup at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion plant in Ohio. Barrasso has cited uranium barter as the reason for his hold on Anne Marie White’s nomination for the position of assistant secretary of energy for environmental management. […]

The White House budget request for fiscal 2019, released Monday, would cut spending at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site by $230 million. The total budget would be $2.185 billion for the budget year beginning Oct. 1. The Office of River Protection (ORP) would receive $1.438 billion, which is $61 million below current spending for […]

The Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico would get a funding spike to $403 million in the Trump administration fiscal 2019 budget request released Monday. That would be $79 million over the 2017 enacted level of spending and $99 million more than WIPP’s annualized spending under a series of short-term budgets passed […]

The Trump administration is again proposing to increase the budget for the Energy Department’s nuclear cleanup office, to $6.6 billion for fiscal 2019. That would be $182 million above the fiscal 2017 enacted level and $100 million above the amount proposed for the current budget year for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management (EM). Since the […]

Strata-G LLC is the recent winner of a $1 million contract from the U.S. Energy Department to conduct environmental sampling at the Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee. Due to incorrect initial information from DOE, the original version of an article in the Feb. 6 edition of Weapons Complex Morning Briefing listed the wrong company.

Leidos has acquired a larger share of Hanford Site contractor Mission Support Alliance to eliminate a conflict of interest for Jacobs Engineering Group. Leidos now owns 88 percent of the support services provider, with Centerra owning the remainder. When Jacobs Engineering Group completed its acquisition of CH2M in December, Jacobs became the partial owner of […]

Signs increasingly point toward startup by the end of 2018 of operations of the long-delayed Integrated Waste Treatment Unit (IWTU) at the Energy Department’s Idaho National Laboratory. DOE Idaho Deputy Manager Jack Zimmerman said during a meeting of the Leadership in Nuclear Energy Commission in Boise the IWTU could start treating radioactive waste by the […]

While it sustained one contract protest, the U.S. Government Accountability Office on Friday did not weigh in on which proposal the Energy Department Office of Environmental Management should have selected for a $4.7 billion liquid waste management contract at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. “GAO’s decision expresses no view as to the merits […]

Department of Energy contractor AECOM on Tuesday reported $4.9 billion in revenue for the first quarter of its fiscal year, ended Dec. 31, 2017. That was 12.7 percent higher than the $4.35 billion recorded in the quarter ended Dec. 31, 2016. The Los Angeles-based global infrastructure company reported quarterly net income and diluted earnings per […]