Retrieval of radioactive waste resumed at Hanford on Thursday, as the new tank farm contractor began pumping radioactive waste from one of the nuclear reservation's oldest underground tanks.
The pumping puts work "back on the road to reducing the risk posed by the waste in these aging tanks," said Bill Johnson, president of Washington River Protection Solutions, or WRPS, in a message to employees.
Tank C-110, which has 126,000 gallons of sludge and other radioactive and chemical waste, could be emptied to regulatory standards by late spring.
The contractor who ran the Savannah River Site for almost two decades and is a big part of the company which was just awarded a new $3.3 billion deal to run the liquid waste operation is under federal investigation for irregular accounting practices.
Washington Savannah River Company altered findings in a 2007 financial audit to justify expenses to the government, federal investigators said in a report made public Wednesday.
The Energy Department's Inspector General said, as a result, it cannot verify more than $1 billion in expenses submitted by WSRC that year.
It's disheartening to see factories that churn out the most hellacious waste in the world plop down into Idaho lava fields, set up high-paying jobs, and then become integrated into the area via churches, spirited Little League ball teams and 4-H clubs. When something dreadful occurs at a nuclear site, often our culture covers it up.
Whistleblowers are terrified of repercussions, being shunned by society and worse. Few want to be known as killing the goose with the golden eggs, even if they are speckled with plutonium. Three years ago, right before Christmas, there was a news splash at the Los Alamos, N.M., laboratory. Five workers were exposed to the highly carcinogenic PU-239. It took several days before this information came out to the public. Then it was through the Project on Government Oversight that co-workers coughed this up to, rather than their own trusted government and contractor.
A typical Florida Power & Light Co. customer will receive an 87-cent refund this March, the upshot of a tiny hole drilled into piping at the utility's Turkey Point Unit 3 nuclear plant in 2006.
The credit will show up on March bills.
The Florida Public Service Commission, which oversees utilities, ruled today that FPL failed to prove it prudently managed temporary contract workers during a spring 2006 outage at the plant. On March 31 that year, a small hole was drilled in pressurizer piping. An investigation found that a disgruntled sheet metal worker who had a history of scrapes with the law, failed an initial psychological exam and was hired through an outside contractor most likely intentionally drilled the hole.
The Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), has a requirement for a contractor to provide technical assistance to the Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health (ABRWH).
The purpose of this announcement is to provide a draft statement of work and invite public comments about this requirement. The draft is shown below. Comments should be submitted to Ms. Florence Black at the Contracting Office Address shown above, via email to fpblack@cdc.gov, or via fax at 412-386-6843. Comments are requested by no later than October 31, 2007.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) gives notice of a decision to designate a class of employees at the Connecticut Aircraft Nuclear Engine Laboratory in Middletown, Connecticut, as an addition to the Special Exposure Cohort (SEC) under the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act of 2000. On October 24, 2008, the Secretary of HHS designated the following class of employees as an addition to the SEC: All employees of the Department of Energy (DOE), its predecessor agencies, and DOE contractors or subcontractors who worked at the Connecticut Aircraft Nuclear Engine Laboratory in Middletown, CT, from January 1, 1958 through December 31, 1965 for a number of work days aggregating at least 250 work days occurring either solely under this employment or in combination with work days within the parameters established for one or more other classes of employees in the Special Exposure Cohort.
This week, President-elect Obama is expected to appoint a Secretary for the Department of Energy (DOE). This person will need some serious muscle: in addition to the enormous task of shifting the bureaucracy's entrenched focus away from nuclear weapons production toward the renewable energy priorities of the Obama Administration, they will also need to hold accountable the contractors who conduct 90 percent of the agency's work.
Additionally, with a seat on the Nuclear Weapons Council, the Secretary will have to stand up against the well-organized offensive for the Bush Administration's failed Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) program. As Walter Pincus reported in the Washington Post last week, U.S. Strategic Commander Air Force Gen. Kevin P. Chilton is calling for a rush to develop and produce RRW because of alleged surety problems--a topic of serious controversy within the nuclear scientific community. Also, in the January/February edition of Foreign Affairs, Sec. of Defense Robert Gates again heralded RRW, without addressing the fact that RRW's test pedigree will be much less extensive than that of the existing stockpile.
Airborne uranium levels will be measured by an Army contractor at three monitoring stations at Pohakuloa Training Area on the Big Island over the next 12 months, Col. Howard Killian told the Public Works Committee of the Hawaii County Council yesterday.
On the Net:
» www.imcom.pac.army.mil/du
The $150,000 testing is being done because the Army discovered in 2007 that uranium "spotting rounds" were used at Pohakuloa in the 1960s.
Radiation monitoring from the Girl Scout camp near Pohakuloa to Konawaena High School nearly 30 miles to the southwest has not found any radiation above background level, Killian said.
A safety "curfew" was in effect at Y-12 for about an hour Monday afternoon after a worker reported a possible leak in a line carrying hydrogen fluoride.
Ellen Boatner, a spokeswoman for Y-12 contractor B&W, said the curfew went into effect shortly after 4 p.m., requiring that all employees stay in place or, if outdoors, go into the nearest building until the order was lifted.
Boatner said the event began after an employee working on the roof of 9212, the plant's main production facility, reported discoloration of a line carrying hydrogen fluoride. Discoloration can be a sign of a leak, she said.
Pantex could reach storage capacity for plutonium weapons cores and retired nuclear warheads awaiting dismantlement by as early as 2014, two government reports reveal.
A federal official said the National Nuclear Security Administration may have to re-evaluate Pantex storage issues if President Obama orders further arms cuts, but the plant has no plan to exceed plutonium storage limits outlined in a 1997 environmental impact statement.
The Pantex Site Office instead has asked contractor B&W Pantex to develop a backup plan in case funding isn't available before 2013 to build a massive new underground warehouse for special nuclear materials, according to a report this month from the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, a watchdog agency that monitors safety issues at Pantex and other sites.
Hanford workers have finished cleaning up a high risk burial ground a mile north of Richland and even closer to the Columbia River.
Over the last year they've dug up and hauled away almost 179,000 tons of dirt and debris, some of it contaminated with chemicals or radionuclides, from the 618-7 Burial Ground.
Washington Closure Hanford, the Department of Energy contractor assigned the work, researched historical records to try to figure out what might have been disposed of in the burial ground from 1960 to 1973.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today issued a Preliminary Notice of Violation (PNOV) to Bechtel National, Inc. (BNI) for nuclear safety violations at DOE's Hanford Site near Richland, Washington. BNI is the contractor responsible for the design and construction of the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP) at the Hanford Site in southeast Washington State.
The Government Accountability Office has dismissed a protest against the award of the $3 billion Mission Support Contract to a team led by Lockheed Martin.
But the dismissal doesn't clear the way for Lockheed Martin to take over support services at Hanford now provided by outgoing contractor Fluor Hanford.
Instead, the Department of Energy will address concerns raised by the GAO and a new decision will be made, according to the GAO. No timeline was given, but DOE released a statement Tuesday saying that it was "confident that the issues raised by the GAO can be addressed both thoroughly and expeditiously."
Four years after cleanup work began at the notorious David Witherspoon scrap operations in the Vestal community of South Knoxville, the job is almost done. That's the word from Bechtel Jacobs Co., the Dept. of Energy's environmental contractor.
So far, about 235,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil and debris have been removed from two Witherspoon sites off Maryville Pike and hauled to Oak Ridge for disposal at DOE's nuclear landfill. Bechtel Jacobs spokesman Dennis Hill said that's enough to cover a football field (including the end zones) to a depth of 100 feet.
Bechtel Jacobs said work should be completed in early 2009, possibly as early as January.
According to an Oct. 3 report by staff of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, about 450 Rackable Can Storage Boxes were loaded by Y-12 workers during FY2007 and '08 to prepare for the move into the new Oak Ridge storage facility for weapons-grade uranium.
Based on previous information released by NNSA and B&W, the managing contractor, each of those boxes holds a half-dozen cans, and each of those cans holds up to 44 pounds of highly enriched uranium (HEU). The defense board memo said B&W plans to begin loading material into the new $549 million storage facility in fiscal year 2010.
The loading is to take place in two phases.
"The first phase is to de-inventory the Warehouse within about three months after start up
The general contractor to build reactors three and four at the Khmelnytsky nuclear power plant will be Russia's ZAO Atomstroiexport, a source in the Fuel and Energy Ministry told Interfax-Ukraine.
"The interagency tender commission on the selection of the type of generating units for reactors three and four at the Khmelnytsky NPP has finished its work. After studying proposals from Atomstroiexport, South Koera's ÊÅÐÑÎ and U.S. company Westinghouse, the commission said that the Russian project was the best," the source said.
All employees of the Department of Energy (DOE), its predecessor agencies, and DOE contractors or subcontractors who worked at the Y- 12 Plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee from March 1, 1943 through December 31, 1947 for a number of work days aggregating at least 250 work days occurring either solely under this employment or in combination with work days within the parameters established for one or more other classes of employees in the Special Exposure Cohort.
The pigeon problem at Hanford's vitrification plant is gone after contractor Bechtel National again called in Hanford's pest control service.
The birds were shot and killed with air rifles in early September after Bechtel could not find any other method it believed would be effective to reduce the problem of bird droppings fouling equipment and work areas of the plant, which is under construction.
DOE's Office of Environmental Management (EM) currently oversees more than 80 of these cleanup projects, primarily at government-owned, contractor-operated sites throughout the nation. Some of these highly complex projects have completion dates beyond 2050. Ten of these projects meet or nearly meet DOE's definition of "major": projects whose costs exceed $1 billion in the near-term-usually a 5-year window of the project's total estimated life cycle.1,2 These 10 projects have combined estimated near-term costs of almost $19 billion and combined life cycle costs estimated to range between $115 billion and $143 billion, and they account for almost half of EM's $5.5 billion fiscal year 2009 budget request.3 These 10 projects are described in detail in appendix II and include the remediation, decontamination, and decommissioning, or the stabilization and disposition of:
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today issued a Preliminary Notice of Violation (PNOV) to Bechtel National, Inc. (BNI) for a nuclear safety violation at DOE's Hanford Site near Richland, Washington. BNI is the contractor responsible for the design and construction of the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP) at the Hanford Site in southeast Washington State.
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