Media reported this week that Poland’s President Andrzej Duda is “ready” to host U.S. nuclear weapons on Polish territory.
Duda made the declaration Monday in a Polish-language interview with the Polish publication Fakt.
House Republicans on the Foreign Affairs Committee, including Rep. Joe Wlson (R-S.C.), whose district includes the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., recently wrote a letter to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken urging the top diplomat to permanently end sanctions waivers with Iran for certain kinds of nuclear cooperation.
The committee last week posted the letter to Blinken on its website.
The trilateral AUKUS partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom and the U.S., focused on giving Australia nuclear-powered, conventionally armed submarines, will take 70 or 80 years to fully implement, a State Department official said in a wide-ranging, virtual media briefing about the initiative.
During the briefing, Bonnie Jenkins, under secretary for arms control and international security, also touched on non proliferation concerns related to AUKUS and the second pillar of the agreement, which involves broad sharing of defense technology in the Pacific region.
The National Nuclear Security Administration has completed a $50-million refurbishment of the electric transmission system at the Nevada Nuclear Security Site, the agency said last week.
Completed in mid-March the 138-kilovolt Power Transmission System Replacement Project modernizes the site’s electrical infrastructure that was built in 1963, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) said in an April 18 press release.
Quanta Infrastructure Solutions Group was the contractor in charge of replacing the aging infrastructure, said an NNSA spokesperson by email Thursday. The project included replacing 26 miles of power lines and old wooden poles, according to the release. The project also curbs the risk of losing critical stockpile stewardship data from experiments, NNSA said.
Thomas Graham last week retired as chair of advanced nuclear fuel developer Lightbridge Corp., Reston, Va., the company announced last week.
Graham had a career of nearly 30 years in the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, according to the bio posted on his personal website.
The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) fined the prime contractor for the Sandia National Laboratories a little more than $59,000 after a worker in 2023 had part of his finger amputated following an accident, the Department of Energy’s Office of Enterprise Assessments said last week.
National Technology and Engineering Solutions of Sandia was also was told to rewrite and update training procedures in the wake of the accident, which happened after a Sandia worker at the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas, used his later-amputated finger to check whether a 750-pound object was level with a nearby surface.
The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has replaced 144 of its light duty vehicles with electric vehicles so far in 2024 as part of President Joe Biden’s administration to electrify federal fleets.
That increased the total percentage of electric vehicles in the nuclear-weapons gency’s fleet to 14% from 3%, the NNSA wrote in a press release last week.
Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Wildland Fire Program team spotted a few really old ponderosa pines on lab property, the lab wrote on its website this week.
The team was out scouting undeveloped property as part of the lab’s wildfire prevention program. Los Alamos has been threatened by several big wildfires since its founding during World War II.
