Department of Energy

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 […]

A pair of public meetings have been scheduled in March on proposed changes in the New Mexico hazardous waste facility permit for the U.S. Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. The meetings, scheduled in Carlsbad and Santa Fe, will focus on clarifying transuranic “Mixed Waste Disposal Volume Reporting,” according to a recent notice posted online […]

Incumbent Navarro Research and Engineering was among a large crowd of firms registered with the U.S. Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management for presolicitation meetings last month on the Nevada Environmental Services Program at the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS). The registration document posted on the Environmental Management Consolidated Business Center website included a four-page […]

A former Hanford Site building, now within the city limits of Richland, Wash., is being torn down under an $11.4 million contract held by CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co. The contract is separate from CH2M’s cleanup contract at Hanford for work such as excavating contaminated waste sites and tearing down contaminated buildings. The Richland building, […]

Jacobs Engineering Group reported $2 million in net earnings for its latest financial quarter, a steep year-over-year dive from $61 million linked to its recent acquisition of CH2M. Earnings for Jacobs’ fiscal 2018 first quarter ended Dec. 31, 2017, took a hit from the $3.27 billion CH2M acquisition and a one-time tax charge, the company […]

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 […]

The U.S. Department of Energy’s record of policing itself is “mixed at best,” and the agency might benefit from independent oversight by an entity such as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) said Tuesday. Pallone made his remarks during a House Energy and Commerce energy subcommittee hearing on U.S. nuclear infrastructure. “For example, […]

The Department of Energy will remain frozen at fiscal 2017 spending levels through at least late March, under the stopgap spending bill passed by Congress and signed by President Donald Trump on Friday morning after an overnight government shutdown — the second of fiscal 2018. The bill is the fifth continuing resolution of the fiscal […]

Workers at the Hanford Site in Washington state twice this week have reported smelling suspicious odors that could be chemical vapors. The two incidents are the first time since Nov. 28 that suspicious odors have been reported outside the radioactive waste storage tank farms at the Department of Energy facility. On Monday afternoon, five Hanford […]

The deputy director of the Department of Energy’s Environmental Management Consolidated Business Center has taken over as acting director. The vacancy newly filled on an interim basis by Jeffrey Kash Grimes was created by the December retirement of Ralph Holland following a 22-year management career at DOE. Holland had taken the reins at the EM […]

Strata-G LLC has won a $1 million contract from the Energy Department to conduct environmental sampling at the Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee. The sampling will support DOE plans for construction of an additional on-site disposal facility for hazardous and radioactive wastes at the Bear Creek Valley area of Oak Ridge, DOE said in a […]

Although details are being kept under wraps by a protective order, the U.S. Government Accountability Office on Friday sustained a protest brought by one losing bidding team against a $4.7 billion contract the Department of Energy awarded in October for liquid waste management at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. The GAO indicated it has […]