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"The company leading the decommissioning of Dounreay has awarded contracts totalling more than £12m to three firms for the next stage of the project. NDSL, Nuvia and Morson International will supply 70 staff to dismantle plant and machinery in some of the most hazardous areas of the Caithness site. They will wear special suits as protection against radiation. Dounreay Site Restoration Limited (DSRL) said the contracts should help it save millions of pounds. "

The U.S. Department of Energy is now looking for a company to operate two depleted uranium hexafluoride conversion facilities in Portsmouth and Paducah, Kentucky. The estimated value of the five-year contracts is $350 to $450 million. The company would oversee conversion of D-O-E's inventory of depleted uranium to a more stable chemical form acceptable for transportation, reuse, or disposal. This inventory is the so-called legacy waste from uranium enrichment that started as part of atomic bomb development by the Manhattan Project during World War Two.

Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials will meet with AREVA NP, Inc., management in Richland, Wash., on Thursday, Nov. 13, to discuss the results of a regulatory safety performance review at the company's commercial nuclear fuel fabrication plant. The meeting will be held at 1 p.m. PST in Conference Room 5 at the AREVA facility, which is located at 2101 Horn Rapids Road in Richland, and will be open to members of the public and the news media. NRC officials will be available during the meeting to answer questions from those in attendance. The NRC staff assessed performance at AREVA during a period beginning Aug. 13, 2006 and ending Aug. 13, 2008 in the areas of operational safety, safeguards, radiological controls, facility support and licensing. The NRC staff review highlighted improvements made by the company in several areas, and based on overall performance, the agency determined that no additional inspections beyond the standard program for such a facility are needed.

Bechtel SAIC Corp. LLC was recently ousted as longtime manager of the U.S. Department of Energy's nuclear waste depository project at Yucca Mountain located 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The unexpected move comes at a time of great uncertainty for the project with the presidential elections and likely change of top Energy Department officials. The most recent price for the depository is $90 billion, or $19 billion more than last year's estimate. Mounting federal debt makes the undertaking, whose history stretches back to 1978, costly given the economy's struggles. San Francisco-based Bechtel and SAIC of San Diego lost their bid to keep the job they had held since 2001. TRW Environmental Safety Systems of Fairfax, Va., served as manager before them. Bechtel is also construction manager for McCarran International Airport's f $3.8 billion capital improvement program.

Hanford workers took their worry and frustration over changes in the way some radioactive waste will be handled to the sidewalk Thursday across from the Federal Building in Richland. About two dozen workers took vacation time Thursday afternoon to protest in front of the Federal Building, home to many Department of Energy offices. By 5 p.m. their number had grown to about 50, most of them gathered along nearby George Washington Way as the after-work Hanford traffic cruised by.

When PowerTech Uranium Corp. began drilling exploration wells in northern Colorado, landowners scrambled to gather baseline water quality information and to learn all they could about the in-situ leach uranium mining process being proposed throughout several western states. Then in March, a Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality internal report revealed several years-long regulatory violations at the nation's largest operational in-situ uranium mine, Cameco Corp.'s Smith Ranch-Highland mine north of Glenrock.

Areva will improve security and site access procedures at its Richland plant and its other facilities as part of a settlement agreement with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission that was announced Friday. Areva used a neutral mediator to resolve a security process violation issue. The company reported it to the commission last year after it found a security guard forged a signature on site access authorization forms and allowed unescorted access to individuals at the Richland plant on five occasions. The commission spared Areva a civil penalty and a notice of violation. The NRC will evaluate Areva's corrective measures during future inspections.

An Amarillo man has been found guilty on 29 charges of defrauding the federal government's Pantex Nuclear Facility by billing for hours he and his employees didn't work. Federal prosecutors said Thursday that 57-year-old Roy David Williams was convicted of wire fraud, theft of public money, 16 counts of fraudulent claims and 11 other counts. Williams is alleged to have defrauded Pantex of more than $169,000 in public money. Authorities say Williams owned WAATTS Inc. in Amarillo and used bogus addresses in Tennessee as part of his scheme.

"A San Antonio municipal utility's public and acrimonious divorce from a proposed two-unit, 2,700-megawatt nuclear power plant is nearly final. San Antonio municipal utility CPS Energy has been trying to separate itself from South Texas Project units 3 and 4 for several months. Last week, a settlement was reached between CPS Energy and Nuclear Innovation North America (NINA) (New York, New York), a consortium of NRG Energy Incorporated /quotes/comstock/13*!nrg/quotes/nls/nrg (NRG 21.84, -0.23, -1.04%) (Princeton, New Jersey) and Toshiba Corporation (TYO: 6502) (Tokyo, Japan) that is developing the two-unit nuclear expansion of the South Texas Project (STP). All that remains is for the CPS Energy board to ratify the deal. Toshiba is the engineering, procurement, and construction firm for STP units 3 and 4. Subcontractors include Fluor Corporation /quotes/comstock/13*!flr/quotes/nls/flr (FLR 42.80, -2.25, -4.99%) (Irving, Texas), Sargent & Lundy LLC (Chicago, Illinois), Bechtel Group Incorporated (San Francisco, California) and Westinghouse (Monroeville, Pennsylvania). "

"At least one worker contaminated with radioactivity during an accidental release at the Bruce Power nuclear power station last November may have been exposed to amounts that exceed federally accepted regulations, according to a report submitted to Canada's nuclear industry watchdog. Last month, company officials told a meeting with the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) that workers who were exposed to alpha radiation in the Nov. 26 incident were only subject to "low doses" of contamination. But in a report Friday, the company says preliminary results show that one worker at the plant may have faced overexposure."

ower plant are refusing to adopt the government-imposed provisional limit on radiation exposure for those workers at the plant, saying it would not be accepted by those at the site, Kyodo News learned Saturday. The limit was lifted from 100 millisieverts to 250 millisieverts in an announcement made March 15 by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare at the request of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, which has the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency under its wing, and other bodies. The increase was requested to enable workers to engage in longer hours of assignments and to secure more workers who meet the restriction.