Local childcare providers near the Los Alamos National Laboratory are complaining that lab management is undercutting their business with a planned offsite daycare center for lab employees, according to an anonymous note circulated by the city chamber of commerce to local media including the local Los Alamos Reporter.
The lab “made no effort to work with local providers” before breaking news about the off-site care center to those same people in late September, the anonymous note reads.
Senior officials from the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs last week held the 11th meeting of the U.S.-Japan Nuclear Security Working Group, making up for a scheduled 2020 meeting that was delayed by COVID. The NNSA posted a press release about the meeting online.
The group helps the two countries cooperate to promote the peaceful use of nuclear energy and prevent the proliferation of potentially dangerous radioactive materials. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. and Japan worked together to remove highly enriched uranium from a Kyoto University research reactor.
Savannah River Nuclear Solutions recently signed a project labor agreement that gives the Fluor-led site operations contractor access to some 2,500 construction and building-trade workers who can help built the site’s planned plutonium pit factory for the NNSA, according to a press release.
The agreement is with the Augusta Building and Construction Trades Council, which represents 19 local unions. The pit plant, the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility, is supposed to be up and running some time in the early- or mid-2030s, NNSA has said. It will be built from the unfinished Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility.
