Los Alamos National Laboratory

Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) said Monday she will block the Senate from quickly confirming nominees for senior Department of Energy jobs until the agency schedules removal of a half-ton tranche of plutonium from Nevada. “Until I get commitment from [Secretary of Energy Rick Perry] that [DOE] will set a date for the removal of […]

An increased risk of radioactive contamination combined with the flouting of federal environmental laws should have persuaded a federal judge to block the Department of Energy from sending weapon-usable plutonium to Nevada, the Silver State told an appeals court this week. Nevada wants the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California to overturn U.S. District […]

The U.S. Department of Energy could do a better job of monitoring how its contractors spend billions of dollars in federal money, the Government Accountability Office said Tuesday. A new GAO report recommends DOE entities, including the Office of Environmental Management and the semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration, put more emphasis on how management and […]

A federal judge this week refused Nevada’s second request to legally block the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) from shipping weapon-usable plutonium to the state from the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. U.S. District Judge Miranda Du, in an order published late Monday, refused to grant an injunction, writing that the request was […]

New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) this week signed a bill that could require contractors operating the Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories to pay the state’s gross receipts tax, even if the contractors are nonprofit organizations. Grisham, the former Democratic congresswoman from Albuquerque, signed Senate Bill 11 on Thursday. The state House of Representatives in […]

The New Mexico Legislature has again passed a bill that could require contractors operating the Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories to pay the state’s gross receipts tax, even if the contractors are nonprofit organizations. The state House of Representatives in Santa Fe passed Senate Bill 11 on Sunday by a vote of 64-0. The […]

Three Department of Energy field managers in New Mexico said Thursday that an agency order issued last year will bring little change in a good relationship with an independent federal watchdog, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB). The officials offered the commitment at a DNFSB public hearing in Albuquerque, N.M. The four board members […]

The New Mexico Senate on Monday unanimously confirmed former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency manager James Kenney as secretary of the state Environment Department. New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) named Kenney as secretary-designate to NMED on Jan. 7. Along with enforcing environmental laws, the department oversees hazardous waste and radioactive sources at U.S. Department […]

It will cost about $1 billion through 2025 to build a new X-ray camera to observe subcritical plutonium experiments at the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS), according to the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). Those figures come from a conceptual design for the planned Advanced Sources and Detectors (ASD) project headed by the Los Alamos National […]

It will cost about $1 billion through 2025 to build a new X-ray camera to observe subcritical plutonium experiments at the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS), according to the National Nuclear Security Administration. Those figures are based on a conceptual design for the planned Advanced Sources and Detectors (ASD) project headed by the Los Alamos National […]

ARLINGTON, Va. — The Defense Department remains satisfied with the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) strategy to produce plutonium pits at two facilities, but time is short to get started, a senior Pentagon official said here. “DOD is fully behind the NNSA’s current plan,” Peter Fanta, deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear matters, said […]

The Department of Energy needs to be more realistic in tracking and reporting progress toward environmental milestones at its nuclear cleanup sites, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said Thursday. “We found that DOE didn’t accurately track or report whether milestones were met, missed, or postponed. We also found that sites continually renegotiate milestones they are […]

ARLINGTON, Va. — The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) will hone its acquisition approach for the plutonium-pit plant to be built at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina around September 2020, a long-time agency contractor said here Wednesday.  Fluor-led Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, the Savannah River site management contractor, is on the hook to […]

ARLINGTON, Va. — The Defense Department remains satisfied with the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) strategy to produce plutonium pits at two facilities, but time is short to get started, a senior Pentagon official said here. “DOD is fully behind the NNSA’s current plan,” Peter Fanta, deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear matters, said […]

The waiting game for re-award of a multibillion-dollar contract for liquid waste management at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina might be over soon, an AECOM executive said Tuesday. “We expect the Savannah River Site to be awarded any day now,” Chief Operating Officer Randall Wotring said during the company’s quarterly […]

A recent local government report shows that the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico accounted for a greater share of a shrinking Los Alamos County workforce over the last decade. As of mid-2018, the Department of Energy facility employed more than 65 percent of the county’s total workforce of roughly 16,300. In 2009, the lab […]

The Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., is expected to receive 330 shipments of transuranic waste over the next 12 months, with some coming from sites that have not shipped material in years. The Energy Department and its WIPP contractor, Nuclear Waste Partnership, held a breakfast presentation Monday for New Mexico lawmakers, […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) “before November 2018” moved roughly half a ton of weapon-usable plutonium to the Nevada National Security Site from the Savannah River Site, in Aiken, S.C., the agency said Wednesday in a bombshell court filing. The announcement caught Nevada's governor and congressional delegation by surprise, prompting an outpouring of online […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) “before November 2018” moved roughly half a ton of weapon-usable plutonium to the Nevada National Security Site from the Savannah River Site, in Aiken, S.C., the agency said Wednesday in a bombshell court filing. The plutonium is part of a 1-metric-ton cache a federal judge in South Carolina ordered […]

The Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., expects to receive 330 shipments of transuranic waste over the next 12 months, with some coming from sites that have not shipped material in years. The Energy Department and its WIPP contractor, Nuclear Waste Partnership, held a legislative breakfast presentation Monday for New Mexico lawmakers, […]

The Department of Energy has issued Waste Control Specialists (WCS) a “request for task proposal” for long-term storage and management of elemental mercury. In a Jan. 17 notice, DOE’s Environmental Management Consolidated Business Center said the Dallas-based operator of a waste disposal complex in West Texas is the only vendor capable of providing the required, […]

The cleanup contractor for the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico has extended the deadline for proposals from subcontractors interested in providing off-site environmental analysis. In an updated notice posted Jan. 22 on FedBizOpps.gov, Newport News Nuclear BWXT-Los Alamos (N3B) said the deadline had been pushed back from Jan. 21 to […]

The cleanup contractor for the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico has extended the deadline for proposals from subcontractors interested in providing off-site environmental analysis. In an updated notice posted Jan. 22 on FedBizOpps.gov, Newport News Nuclear BWXT-Los Alamos (N3B) said the deadline had been pushed back from Jan. 21 to […]

Two advocacy groups in New Mexico filed a legal appeal Thursday seeking to undo a New Mexico Environment Department order that allows the Energy Department to change the way it records underground transuranic waste volume at its Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad. The Southwest Research and Information Center (SRIC) and Nuclear Watch New […]

Newport News Nuclear BWXT-Los Alamos (N3B), cleanup contractor for the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, is seeking a subcontractor to conduct off-site laboratory tests on soil, water, and debris samples. The successful bidder must be able to conduct inorganic, organic, and radiochemical analyses on a wide variety of environmental samples, […]

The Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday announced four leadership changes and other churn among its seven subcommittees for the 116th Congress, but only one gavel hand-off among the Republicans who remain in the majority. Notably for nuclear weapons programs managed by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) became the ranking member of […]

A federal judge had not ruled by early Friday afternoon whether the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) can ship a metric ton of weapon-usable plutonium to the Nevada National Security Site. Judge Miranda Du of the U.S. District Court for Nevada in Reno on Thursday heard arguments from attorneys representing the state of Nevada and […]

The Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., received 311 shipments of defense transuranic waste during 2018. May was the busiest month of the year, with 37 shipments. January, with two federal holidays and a two-week maintenance outage, was the slowest month in 2018 with only 14 shipments, according to a monthly […]

Newport News Nuclear BWXT-Los Alamos (N3B), cleanup contractor for the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, is seeking a subcontractor to conduct off-site laboratory tests on soil, water, and debris samples. The successful bidder must be able to do inorganic, organic, and radiochemical analyses on a wide variety of environmental samples, […]

The former management contractor for the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico received a slap on the wrist from the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) over a 2017 incident in which personnel entered a low-oxygen environment in violation of federal workplace safety laws. No one was hurt in the Sept. 13, 2017, incident, in […]