The congressman representing the district surrounding the Energy Department’s Hanford Site in Washington state is facing off with five challengers in an Aug. 4 primary for which voting by mail has already started.
Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.) has represented the 4th Congressional District in central Washington since January 2015. As a member of House Appropriations Committee and its energy and water subcommittee, Newhouse has frequently lobbied to fund cleanup at the former plutonium production facility and for money to resume licensing for the planned nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
An 18-day vote by mail period started on July 17. The top two candidates will face off in the Nov. 3 general election. In his last race in November 2018, Newhouse easily defended his seat by carrying almost 63% of the vote against Democrat Christine Brown.
This time around, Newhouse is facing: Democrat Doug McKinley, an attorney; Libertarian Ryan Cooper, a former Army National Guard member who previously ran an unsuccessful race for the Washington state Senate; Independent Evan Jones, a consultant and former high school educator; Republican Sarena Sloot, a nurse practitioner; and Republican Tracy Wright.
There are roughly 690,000 people in the 4th District, which includes Adams, Benton, Franklin, Grant, Okanogan, and Yakima counties and parts of Douglas and Walla Walla counties.
NAC International will provide the canisters that would hold radioactive waste in storage or disposal through Deep Isolation’s planned “horizontal borehole” approach, the two companies announced Tuesday.
In a press release, Berkeley, Calif.-based Deep Isolation said it had sealed an extended cooperation deal with NAC, a spent nuclear fuel management specialist headquartered in Peachtree Corners, Ga. The companies announced a short-term memorandum of agreement last November.
The terms of the deal, including its length and value, are confidential, said Deep Isolation spokeswoman Kari Hulac. That also applies to details about the canisters, such as the number to be manufactures.
“Leveraging NAC and Deep Isolation canister technology and intellectual property, NAC will engineer, license and deliver the canisters and other equipment associated with the handling and transferring of high-level waste, spent nuclear fuel and other nuclear waste from existing storage areas to a Deep Isolation repository,” according to the press statement.
Founded in 2016, Deep Isolation offers a patented system for directional drilling to provide temporary storage or permanent disposal of radioactive waste. The company said it has raised $14 million to date and has “half a dozen” letters of intent in hand for prospective contracts. Details of those letters of intent are also not being released, Hulac said.
The company has not yet announced a contract for a borehole. In April, Deep Isolation said it had secured its first contract with a non-government client: to support an industry study of the feasibility of borehole disposal of spent fuel on the properties of advanced nuclear power reactors that generate the material. Deep Isolation has not publicly discussed contracts with government customers.
Orano TN said Wednesday it has promoted a vice president to the newly established position of chief commercial officer.
Roger Maggi assumed the role this month after more than two years as vice president for aging management systems at the nuclear logistics subsidiary of Orano USA, according to his LinkedIn profile.
“I want to thank Orano for trusting me with this role, and I commit to delivering the right solutions to industry delivering on the Nuclear Promise,” he wrote on the website.
The job includes management of all commercial and product-strategy activities for Orano TN’s work in the United States, according to a company press release.
A three-decade veteran of the nuclear industry, Maggi previously worked for Orano predecessor AREVA and served in the Navy.
The announcement came as Orano TN prepares for a third pre-application meeting with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for licensing its new spent fuel transport cask. The meeting is scheduled for Aug. 18.
“We anticipate filing the TN Eagle application for the EOS canister before the end of the year,” with the cask intended to be available for market by 2023, Orano spokesman Curtis Roberts said by email Tuesday.
Details such as the life-cycle cost for the system and the number of casks to be produced are proprietary information, Roberts said. He did not say how long the cask has been in development.
The TN Eagle would be licensed for transport, starting with the Extended Optimized Storage (EOS) dry-shielded canister, which can hold 37 pressurized water reactor high-burnup fuel assemblies or 89 boiling water reactor fuel assemblies.
Per NRC practice, the application would first undergo an acceptance review to ensure Orano has submitted the necessary data, then a full technical review that would determine the decision on licensing.
Huntington Ingalls Industries said Tuesday its operations for the Department of Energy would not be affected by the newly announced merging of two business groups.
The corporate parent of Newport News Shipbuilding is combining two business lines within its Technical Solutions division: The previous Fleet Support and Mission Driven Innovative Solutions (MDIS) groups are becoming the Defense and Federal Solutions group.
This new group will focus on tackling “tough national security challenges” for the Department of Defense, the intelligence community, and other domestic and international customers, Huntington Ingalls said in a press release.
The other two groups within the Technical Solutions division are Unmanned Systems, a provider of remotely operated underwater vehicles and surface vessels; and the Nuclear and Environmental Services group, which supports DOE environmental remediation and National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) operations. The release also said the Nuclear and Environmental Services group is poised to serve the expanding market for decommissioning of retired commercial power reactors.
Huntington Ingalls has been looking at entering the nuclear plant decommissioning field since at least 2018, but does not currently have any commercial contracts, a spokeswoman said Tuesday by email.
A Huntington-led joint venture, Newport News Nuclear BWXT Los Alamos (N3B), manages the 10-year, $1.38 billion legacy cleanup contract at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The shipbuilder is also one of the minority partners in the Fluor-led Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, which operates DOE’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina under a 12-year, $14.8 billion contract. Huntington Ingalls headed the team that in April lost a protest before the Government Accountability Office on a potential $4 billion contract awarded to a Leidos-led joint venture to provide landlord services at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
From The Wires
From The Press and Journal: Scottish Environment Protection Agency investigating levels of radioactivity in groundwater below Dounreay nuclear cleanup site.
From Mining.com: Australian government establishes Radioactive Waste Agency.
From the Denton, Texas, Record-Chronicle: Little progress made over two years in decommissionng radioactively contaminated pharmaceutical facility.
