After threatening for years, the University of Berkeley Law Environmental Law Clinic and Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice sued the Navy and Environmental Protection Agency in May over concerns of improper and fraudulent inspection of radioactive contamination at Hunter Point Naval Shipyard in San Francisco, Calif.
Greenaction, a Bay-area nonprofit, and Berkeley listed strontium-90, cesium-137, cobalt-60, plutonium-239, radium-226, thorium-232, hydrogen-3, and uranium-236 as radionuclides of concern in their notice of intent to sue. The ships were contaminated during Operation Crossroads tests in the 1950s and towed to Hunter Point for cleanup. The EPA later declared the shipyard a superfund site, Berkeley wrote in its press release on the suit.
In 2017, Greenaction, a Bay-area non-profit, petitioned the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to revoke the license of Tetra Tech, the Navy’s contractor at Hunter Point, due to alleged fraudulent sampling and inspection of radioactive materials in the shipyard. In the current lawsuit, Greenaction and Berkeley said the Navy allowed the fraud to continue and violated its legal obligation by not following up with Tetra Tech to ensure the contractor retested the radioactive material.
The prime contractor for the Sandia National Laboratories extended by one day a deadline for responding to a request for information about possible public-private partnerships to develop and share pulsed power facilities, including one that could be larger than the lab’s Z Machine nuclear-weapon-material testing facility.
National Technology & Engineering Solutions pushed the deadline to Saturday from Friday, according to a note posted online Wednesday. “[S]upporting commercial fusion energy companies in particular may be synergistic with broader Department of Energy goals,” the prime wrote in the request for information.
Jeff Griffin, a former executive with Canadian National Laboratories as well the Department of Energy’s cleanup branch, has taken a senior vice president post with DOE’s management contractor for the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
At Fluor-led Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, Griffin will head plutonium disposition operations, according to the contractor’s website. “I loved my assignment at the Canadian Nuclear Laboratories,” Griffin wrote this week on his LinkedIn page. “But, after almost six years off doing other things, it is nice to return home to Aiken and the important missions of the Savannah River Site.”
Griffin headed field operations for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management when he left the agency in early 2020 to accept a vice president post at Canadian National Laboratories. Griffin has over 30 years of nuclear experience, most of it in research and development. He is a former associate laboratory director at the Savannah River National Laboratory.
A senior Iranian official and adviser to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Iran will alter its nuclear policy if its existence is threatened, Reuters reported, citing an interview with an Iranian news agency that aired on Al Jazeera Mubasher.
“In the case of an attack on our nuclear facilities by the Zionist regime, our deterrence will change,” Kamal Kharrazi, adviser to Khamenei, told the Iranian Students’ News Network in the interview that, according to the network, was broadcast on Mubasher, an Al Jazeera station analogous to C-Span in the U.S.
The prime contractor for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Nevada National Security Site seeks information from companies interested in providing underground construction services for the agency’s new subcritical-weapons lab.
In a request for information published online, NNSS calls for potential mid- to large-sized contractors to provide construction management, equipment, and materials to work for the ZEUS Test Bed Facility project to be housed at the Principal Underground Laboratory for Subcritical Experimentation at the site’s underground U1a Complex. Responses are due May 16.
Obituary
George Merkel, a Ph.D. nuclear physicist, died on March 27 in Alexandria, Va., according to an obituary posted online this week. He was 94, according to the obituary, which did not identify a cause of death.
In the 1960s, Merkel worked at what was then the University of California Radiation Laboratory and what is now the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He worked on radiation, fission, and weapons systems with the General Atomics Corporation.
