In remarks at the 10th review conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, Secretary of State Antony Blinken condemned Russia’s war in Ukraine and Iran’s race to uranium enrichment, touted a 90% reduction in U.S. nuclear arms since the height of the Cold War and defended the U.S. decision to cancel scheduled intercontinental ballistic missile tests this year.
Signatories to the treaty, NPT, for short, gathered at U.N. headquarters in New York this week to begin the latest review conference of the main international instrument for reducing proliferation of nuclear weapons. Jill Hruby, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), was scheduled to address the conference Friday, after deadline for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor, as part of a panel that included other senior government officials.
The NNSA planned to turn over a report about the Pantex Plant’s external dosimetry program to the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board in November, NNSA Administrator Hruby told the board in a letter late last week.
NNSA and site contractor Consolidated Nuclear Security have been working on the report since sometime after an employee at the Amarillo, Texas, weapons service center left their dosimetry badge near a linear accelerator. The badge subsequently got such a high dose of radiation that, had it had a human attached, the person would have been barred from radiological areas for a while. Pantex no longer analyzes its employees’ external dosimeters onsite. In 2020, with old equipment failing, the site outsourced those analyses to the Y-12 National Security Site.
The Y-12 National Security Complex switched its power lines over to a new substation known as Pine Ridge, the site wrote in a press release last week.
A crucial bit of infrastructure needed to support the NNSA’s Uranium Processing Facility, the substation provoked a little bit of ire from locals who worried about potential eyesores in their backyard.
