As expected, the Department of Energy said this week it plans to issue a six-month contract extension to Atkins-led Mid-America Conversion Services for operation of depleted uranium conversion facilities at former gaseous diffusion plants in Kentucky and Ohio.
DOE’s justification for going without competitive bids said the extension would run from April 1 through Sept. 30 of this year. DOE has previously said it planned such an extension.
This comes as industry awaits DOE to award a contract that would include the work done by Mid-America as well as certain other operation and maintenance work at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio and the Paducah Site in Kentucky. It has been nearly two years since the Office of Environmental Management put out the $2.9-billion solicitation and a top cleanup official said he understands frustration at the slow pace of the procurement.
A House Energy and Commerce subcommittee plans a hearing next week on spent fuel management for the U.S. nuclear power plants.
The hearing, dubbed “American Nuclear Energy Expansion: Spent Fuel Policy and Innovation,” is set for Wednesday April 10 at 10:30 a.m. at the Rayburn House Office Building, according to a press release.The session was announced Wednesday by House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) and Energy, Climate, and Grid Security subcommittee Chair Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.).
Ensuring the federal government fulfills its obligation to provide a disposal path for spent nuclear fuel will be an issue covered at the hearing, according to the release. The Department of Energy is pursuing its much-touted consent-based siting plan for an interim storage facility, though Congress must still authorize the agency to build it. A witness list for the hearing was not immediately available on the committee website, although it should be confirmed within a couple of days, a committee spokesperson said by email. The hearing will be live streamed online.
The National Nuclear Security Administration on Tuesday officially announced Michael Mikolanis as its new top federal official at the agency’s Savannah River Site field office near Aiken, S.C.
The Exchange Monitor reported in December that Mikolanis would make the move to the Savannah River Site from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The NNSA announced Mikolanis’ arrival in a press release. At Savannah River, Mikolanis will manage the federal field office that oversees the site’s much larger contractor base.
Mikolanis was most recently the manager for the DOE Office of Environmental Management’s Los Alamos Field Office, where he oversaw cleanup of radioactive waste from the Manhattan Project and the Cold War. With the move, Sarah (Ellie) Gilbertson is the acting nuclear cleanup field office manager at Los Alamos. She first became acting deputy there in June 2022 and later promoted to deputy. Gilbertson has also worked at NNSA.
Claudia Jaramillo, Jacobs Solutions’ chief financial officer, will leave the Dallas-based company effective April 15 after less than a year in the job, the company announced Monday in a regulatory filing.
Jaramillo “is departing the Company to pursue other opportunities,” Jacobs wrote in a press release distributed Monday. She became Jacobs’ chief financial officer on Aug. 14, 2023 after joining the company in July 2022, according to another Jacobs press release. Jaramillo will have lasted eight months as the finance chief.
Kevin Berryman, a special advisor to Jacobs CEO Robert Pragada, succeeded Jaramillo as the interim chief financial officer effective March 29, the company wrote in an 8-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Jacobs plans to spin off its government contracting and cyber businesses to Amentum, Chantilly, Va., in the second half of 2024. The merger will create a standalone public company majority owned by Jacobs shareholders and Jacobs itself.
On Earth Day, April 21, the Department of Energy will announce which of its federal installations scored best on the agency’s 2023 Sustainable Climate-Ready Sites program.
Twelve DOE properties, mostly weapons complex sites, signed up for the program put together by DOE’s Office of Sustainable Environmental Stewardship, according to a March 29 press release. The program scores the participating DOE properties on 15 categories ranging from air quality and carbon-free electricity to waste minimization and water management.
Sites in the program are the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, Idaho National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the National Energy Technology Laboratory in Pennsylvania and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado.
