An investigative office within the Department of Energy is looking into a December 2022 accident at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina that resulted in an employee of the prime contractor having a finger amputated.
The enforcement unit within DOE’s Office of Enterprise Assessments told Savannah River Nuclear Solutions president and CEO Stuart MacVean in a March 23 letter of its plans to investigate the circumstances involved in the Dec. 1 accident.
An accident occurrence report filed with DOE on Dec. 19 said the employee’s right hand was caught between a fan belt and a fan sheave while removing a guard on an air handling unit. The employee was attempting to troubleshoot the unit, which was making noise and vibrating. The worker was initially treated at Augusta University Hospital and later met with the Savannah River Site medical director on Dec. 2 and Dec. 12, according to the document.
Idaho Gov. Brad Little (R) and Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador (R) joined Department of Energy managers and contractors Tuesday to celebrate Idaho National Laboratory’s transfer of spent fuel from wet-to-dry storage in accordance with a 1995 settlement agreement milestone between the state and the federal government.
Thousands of spent nuclear fuel assemblies from government and commercially owned reactors were held for decades in water-filled basins and internal canals across the 890-square-mile laboratory site. The transfer to safer dry storage casks, which started in the 1990s, was only completed in the past month, according to a DOE press release. Much of the fuel came from reprocessing at the Idaho Nuclear Technology and Engineering Center, which ended in 1992.
The move to dry storage was sought by the state to reduce the potential threat of contamination to the underground Snake River Plain Aquifer, which flows hundreds of feet below the surface of the Idaho National Laboratory.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) on March 22 unsuccessfully urged the Senate to unanimously pass his bill telling the federal government to remediate radioactive contamination at the Jana Elementary School in St. Louis County, Mo., and vowed to block all Department of Energy nominees until he gets a federal commitment.
In February, Hawley introduced the Justice for Jana Elementary Act following a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing in which he urged DOE to step in and clean up the shuttered school near a Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program (FUSRAP) work site if the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers fails to do so. In a video posted on youtube, Hawley said contamination from Coldwater Creek, 1,000 feet from the school, has resulted in radiation on the playground and “inside the building.”
Hawley and Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) have been pushing for federal action since an October 2022 study by Boston Chemical Data Corp., said the campus exceeded Environmental Protection Agency cleanup standards, prompting local education officials to close the school. The Army Corps, however, has said radiation levels are within background levels. The school board is asking for federal help.
A federal magistrate judge was assigned to handle pre-trial matters in a racial discrimination lawsuit brought by an employee at the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico who claims he was unfairly bypassed for promotion by the former site management contractor.
U.S. District Judge James Browning issued an order earlier this month in assigning U.S. Magistrate Judge Damian Martinez to oversee pre-trial proceedings in the case brought by Eddie Thomas against Nuclear Waste Partnership.
Thomas filed suit against the former Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) management contractor in 2021, saying he was the only African American working in security there in May 2020 when he was passed over for a promotion allegedly due to his race. In its reply, Amentum-led Nuclear Waste Partnership said Thomas lacked the needed security clearance level needed when the job was posted. The magistrate set a discovery hearing for April 12. Jury selection for the case has been tentatively set for early May in U.S. District Court for New Mexico.
Geiger Brothers, an Ohio-based engineering and contracting business, won a $9.9 million contract from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to build the K-25 viewing platform at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee, the corps announced last week.
The award from the U.S. Army Corps’ Nashville District was posted in a Friday March 24 notice on the federal procurement website, SAM.gov. Geiger Brothers was selected for the small-business set-aside contract over two other bidders, Global Co. LLC and WAI Construction, which both submitted bids that were about $100,000 more than the Geiger Brothers proposal, according to documents accompanying the award.
The last of the Manhattan Project and Cold War uranium enrichment structures was torn down in 2020 at the former K-25 gaseous diffusion plant, an area of the Oak Ridge Site that DOE now calls the East Tennessee Technology Park.
