National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)

The ex-finance chief of the Honeywell-led Nevada site operations contractor Mission Support and Test Services is pressing on with a lawsuit in which he claims that his exposure of alleged financial impropriety at the privately held contractor was protected by the Sarbanes Oxley anti-corruption act. “Privately held companies such as MSTS [Mission Support and Test […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration in November shot its first deep-underground test involving special nuclear materials at the Nevada National Security Site in more than a year, according to a recent report from the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board. The Los Alamos National Lab and Nevada site prime Mission Support and Test Services supervised the […]

A single-owner team led by Battelle Memorial Institute will manage the Savannah River National Laboratory for up to 10 years under a potentially $3.8 billion contract announced Tuesday by the Department of Energy. Battelle Savannah River Alliance, LLC (BSRA), Columbus, Ohio, beat out three other bidders for the cost-plus-award-fee contract just awarded by DOE’s Environmental […]

The former finance chief of Mission Support and Test Services LLC, who alleges he was fired last year for exposing financial misconduct at the Nevada National Security Site by company president Mark Martinez, has less than two weeks to revise his lawsuit before a federal judge throws it out for good. Ex-Chief Financial Officer Stephen […]

House Armed Services chair Adam Smith (D-Wash.) again railed against the National Nuclear Security Administration’s plan to turn Savannah River into a plutonium pit factory, saying the “idiotic” and “dangerous,” plan might leave the U.S. without the means to modernize its nuclear weapons on time and on budget. “I am highly skeptical of the level […]

There will not be a new director at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for another few months at least, a spokesperson for the younger of the two U.S. nuclear-weapon design labs said Tuesday. “We are not expecting a new director to be named until February at the earliest,” the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) spokesperson […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration is preparing a final environmental review for its new plutonium disposal program at the Savannah River Site, but not the thorough review a National Academies panel recommended earlier this year, the agency announced Wednesday. The semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear weapons agency published its notice of intent to do an environmental […]

If, with a herculean effort, you put the COVID-19 pandemic to one side, the biggest story of 2020 at the National Nuclear Security Administration was how semi-autonomous it really is from the Department of Energy, and how much control the Department of Defense should have over it. The debate is in a sense older than […]

The New Mexico Environment Department is still waiting on the Department of Energy to provide more details on the planned remediation of contamination discovered earlier this year on a public road outside the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The preliminary screening plan that will determine if the hazardous constituents at the 28-acre DP Road site are […]

There will not be a new director at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for another few months at least, a spokesperson for the younger of the two U.S. nuclear-weapon design labs said Tuesday. “We are not expecting a new director to be named until February at the earliest,” the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) spokesperson […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration is preparing a final environmental review for its new plutonium disposal program at the Savannah River Site, but not the thorough review a National Academies panel recommended earlier this year, the agency announced Wednesday. The semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear weapons agency published its notice of intent to do an […]

The former finance chief of Mission Support and Test Services LLC, who alleges he was fired last year for exposing financial misconduct at the Nevada National Security Site by company president Mark Martinez, has less than two weeks to revise his lawsuit before a federal judge throws it out for good. Ex-Chief Financial Officer Stephen […]

House Armed Services chair Adam Smith (D-Wash.) again railed against the National Nuclear Security Administration’s plan to turn Savannah River into a plutonium pit factory, saying the “idiotic” and “dangerous,” plan might leave the U.S. without the means to modernize its nuclear weapons on time and on budget. “I am highly skeptical of the level […]

The coronavirus pandemic pushed a choice between two competing defense-uranium enrichment technologies to January from December, the National Nuclear Security Administration said Wednesday. It’s the second time this year the agency has delayed the day of reckoning between the AC100 technology that Centrus Energy Corp., Bethesda, Md., started developing around 2012, and a smaller-scale enrichment […]

The House and Senate both passed the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act with veto proof margins this week, sending the bill to President Trump’s desk where it remained at deadline Friday. The president had threatened to veto the measure, and its nuclear-weapons policies, for reasons unrelated to defense spending. Also this week, Congress approved a […]

The coronavirus pandemic pushed a choice between two competing defense-uranium enrichment technologies to January from December, the National Nuclear Security Administration said Wednesday. It’s the second time this year the agency has delayed the day of reckoning between the AC100 technology that Centrus Energy Corp., Bethesda, Md., started developing around 2012, and a smaller-scale enrichment […]

A little over a month after the secretary of energy demanded her resignation as head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, the Donald Trump administration welcomed Lisa Gordon-Hagerty back into the fold, appointing her to a Pentagon advisory board. The Department of Defense announced Wednesday that Gordon-Hagerty will join its Defense Policy Board, potentially giving […]

The House of Representatives approved the final version of the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act with a veto-proof margin Tuesday evening, sending the bill and its new nuclear waste and weapons policies to the Senate. The House passed the bill 300-135 , with every member voting. Among other things, the measure would require the Department […]

The Department of Energy says it will be up to the winner of the Carlsbad Technical Assistance Contract to train its own employees and the cost will be borne by the new contractor. That is one of the takeaways from a package of questions and answers published Wednesday by DOE on the potential $100-million small […]

The personnel churn in the Donald Trump administration’s nuclear-weapons enterprise and Joe Biden’s election as President of the United States highlight the urgency of giving the administrator of the National nuclear Security Administration a fixed term, members of a National Academies panel said Wednesday. “At the moment we not only have secretary and deputy secretary […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration on Monday moved to reassure the city of Oak Ridge that moving some uranium purification outside the fence at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge Tenn., will not cost the site any jobs. The city raised the alarm in a statement issued before the Thanksgiving holiday last week, […]

A version of the fiery interagency and inter-branch tug of war that produced this year’s controversial civilian nuclear weapons budget would be essentially legalized, if a compromise 2021 defense authorization bill unveiled Thursday becomes law. The unified 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which lameduck President Donald Trump has threatened to veto over matters unrelated […]

For the second week in a row, the National Nuclear Security Administration broke its record for new confirmed COVID-19 cases in a week, reflecting the disease’s rapid spread among the general population. Nationally, the U.S. is setting new daily case records almost daily, according to data tracked by the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.  At […]

The personnel churn in the Donald Trump administration’s nuclear-weapons enterprise and Joe Biden’s election as President of the United States highlight the urgency of giving the administrator of the National nuclear Security Administration a fixed term, members of a National Academies panel said Wednesday. “At the moment we not only have secretary and deputy secretary […]

On Tuesday, another Democratic lawmaker called for President-elect Joe Biden to publish what would be the third U.S. nuclear posture review in as many administrations — a potential step toward altering the course of the nuclear modernization regimen that started in 2016. “They’ll have to do a top-to-bottom review of these programs and think about […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration on Monday moved to reassure the city of Oak Ridge that moving some uranium purification outside the fence at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge Tenn., will not cost the site any jobs. The city raised the alarm in a statement issued before the Thanksgiving holiday last week, […]

There were 270 new, confirmed COVID-19 cases, including another fatal case, among National Nuclear Security Administration contractor employees and civil servants as of the end of the Thanksgiving holiday week, an agency spokesperson said Monday. The fatal case was at the Los Alamos National Laboratory: the second COVID-19 death at the nation’s first nuclear weapons […]

Local officials with the City of Oak Ridge slammed the National Nuclear Security Administration’s decision to shift some national security work to BWX Technologies Subsidiary Nuclear Fuel Services, Erwin, Tenn., from the Y-12 National Security Complex. The semi-autonomous Department of Energy nuclear-weapons agency informed the city of the move in an email the day before […]

Rep. Rick Allen (R-Ga.), whose district includes Augusta, a major bedroom community for the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in neighboring South Carolina, has tested positive for the coronavirus. “I have been undergoing regular COVID-19 testing and learned today that I have tested positive for COVID-19,” Allen said in a press release posted on […]

Plutonium pits, Cold War liquid waste and stricter policing of the contractor base are among the biggest management challenges for the Department of Energy in fiscal year 2021, the agency’s Inspector General wrote this week in the latest version of an annual report. Pits are new on the Inspector General’s list this year, but liquid […]