The USS Wyoming ballistic missile submarine launched a pair of Trident II D5LE missiles from the Eastern Test Range near Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Friday, Sept. 17, the Navy announced in a press release over the weekend.
The launch of the unarmed missiles were part of Demonstration and Shakedown Operation DASO-31, the Navy wrote in its press release.
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory awarded Dell Technologies a subcontract to provide more than 40 petaFlops of computing capacity for nuclear weapons programs, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) said in a press release this week.
The award under the Commodity Technology Systems contract (CTS-2) from NNSA’s Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program will provide at least $40 million at Livermore, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in northern New Mexico, and the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M., the NNSA wrote in the release.
Centrus’ chief executive officer got some Twitter love from the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) this week, amid the international networking and hobnobbing in Vienna, Austria, during the U.N. body’s 65th General Conference.
In a message including a photo of the two, IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi tweeted that he had a “fascinating discussion” with Centrus chief Daniel Poneman about “the nuclear fuel and services market.”
Community groups in New Mexico and South Carolina will administer a combined $7 million worth of NNSA grants to teach attendees of 18 minority-serving institutions in the states how to do work needed to produce plutonium pits, the agency wrote in a press release this week.
The New Mexico Academic Consortium and the Savannah River Site Community Reuse Organization in South Carolina will each administer half of the funding, dividing it between 10 organizations in New Mexico and eight in South Carolina. The 2021 omnibus spending bill that funded the federal government set the $7 million aside “for Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic Serving Institutions, and Tribal Colleges and Universities in South Carolina and New Mexico to support pit production.”
Sens. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) and Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) cosponsored a bill that would extend the expiring Radiation Exposure Compensation Act for 19 more years and extend the law’s financial compensation to people who were exposed to radiation while working in uranium mines, according to a press release from Luán.
The law, and the protection it provides for downwinders in southwestern and mountain states, would otherwise expire in July. The new bipartisan bill would provide up to $150,000 in coverage for people sickened by exposure to radiation from atmospheric tests in the Pacific, Nevada and New Mexico, or from uranium mining and milling. Claimants must have been present in a covered location for at least a year to be eligible, according to the bill.
