An amendment approved in committee this week to the House’s 2023 National Defense Authorization Act would let Australian submarine officers attend naval nuclear reactors school in the U.S. and be stationed aboard U.S. submarines. The full House must still pass the bill.
The amendment is similar to the bipartisan Australia-U.S. Submarine Officer Pipeline Act legislation introduced on June 15. It would essentially create a joint training pipeline between the U.S. Navy and the Royal Australian Navy to support the trilateral AUKUS partnership to transfer nuclear propulsion technology to Austria.
Those interested in helping National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) address a looming glovebox supply crunch have until June 30 to send their best ideas to the semi-autonomous nuclear weapons agency, which this month put out a request for information about glovebox fabrication.
Citing a study conducted by the Energy Facility Contractors Group, the NNSA wrote in its request for information that, if Congress fully funds the agency’s plans for building new plutonium pit factories — which Congress largely has over the past several years — annual DOE demand for glovebox production could skyrocket to around 350 by 2025, more than three times the historic average.
NNSA Administrator Jill Hruby agreed that eight safety concerns the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) raised about the planned Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility in South Carolina ‘merit attention,” according to a letter, dated Wednesday, that the board published this week.
In November, the DNFSB sent the NNSA a list of safety concerns about the proposed pit factory, one of two the agency needs to meet military needs for nuclear-weapon refurbishments for much of the rest of the century. The board’s list touched on worker safety, waste containers, gloveboxes and the overall sturdiness of the factory structure, which as a pit plant will be much busier and densely occupied than it would have been as a plutonium recycling plant, the job for which the building was originally designed.
The NNSA planned to host a virtual job fair on June 29, the agency announced this week.
Anyone who is interested should register and submit their resumes online, the agency said.
