The Department of Energy’s Environmental Management Consolidated Business Center is seeking responses until Dec. 18 to its request for information for technical assistance contracts at certain nuclear complex sites.
According to the procurement notice posted online Nov. 26, DOE’s Office of Environmental Management is looking for a small business to provide technical assistance to field offices for the West Valley Demonstration Project in New York, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
DOE Environmental Management has asked interested parties to submit capability statements by 2 p.m. Eastern Time on Dec. 18.The contact person on the market research is William Brown, william.brown@emcbc.doe.gov.
Fluor-led Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS) has started early construction of a training facility for National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) plutonium pit production at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
Construction of the High-Fidelity Training and Operations Center, a future non-nuclear operations training facility for the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility, started in October, SRNS said in a Thursday press release.
SRNS subcontractor Enercon has completed 90% of the training center’s design, and SRNS has issued a limited notice to proceed to subcontractor Kiewit to begin site prep for the center, said Brian Pool, the SRNS project director for the training center. “SRNS also is expediting our procurement and fabrication strategy for [training center] gloveboxes and long-lead items,” Pool said. The training center should be complete in the late 2020s.
BWXT Technologies said last week it has delivered its first full core of modern nuclear fuel for the Project Pele mobile microreactor prototype at the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory.
The tri-structural isotropic (TRISO) particle fuel, made of uranium, carbon and oxygen within small kernels, has been delivered to Project Pele, BWXT said.
BWXT has been working with the Department of Defense on the compact and transportable Generation IV high-temperature gas-cooled reactor units capable of generating 1.5 megawatts of electricity. “This is real nuclear microreactor fuel delivered at its final destination, rather than some letter or memorandum promising to make fuel at a later date,” Jeff Waksman, principal deputy assistant secretary of the Army for Installations, said in BWXT’s Dec. 2 press release.
Julie Kozeracki has been promoted to acting chief investment officer for the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Dominance Financing, which was previously known as DOE’s Loan Programs Office.
The office “can do many amazing things and I’m looking forward to making more progress on my personal favorite: restarting, uprating, and building big nuclear reactors,” Kozeracki said in a Tuesday LinkedIn post.
The DOE office recently approved a $1 billion loan to support Constellation Energy’s restart the former Three Mile Island Unit 1 nuclear facility in Pennsylvania. Kozeracki has been with the DOE office since 2022 as a senior adviser and a director of strategy. Before DOE, she spent seven years with the Boston Consulting Group, according to her LinkedIn biography.
James Gallagher Jr., a retired Westinghouse Electric, died this week in Pennsylvania at age 88. Gallagher retired from Westinghouse in 2000 following a nuclear industry career that took him to more than 40 countries, according to an obituary.
Following his retirement, Gallagher was a consultant on energy and environmental issues and served on several boards and served as a president of the Waste Management Symposia. Gallagher earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Chemical Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh.