The Senate on Monday voted 87-0 to confirm Department of Justice attorney Robert Feitel as the new inspector general for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Feitel succeeds Hubert Bell, who served 22 years as the industry regulator’s inspector general before retiring in December 2018.
There was no debate on Feitel’s nomination prior to the Senate’s roll-call vote, following introductory comments from Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman John Barrasso (R-Wyo.). It was the upper chamber’s first day back in session after a recess of more than five weeks due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Feitel was nominated in October and advanced out of Barrasso’s committee in December. He had not been sworn in as of Friday morning and was expected to start on the job later in the month.
The NRC inspector general heads an office with an annual budget of roughly $13 million. Its mission is to prepare audits and investigations “to promote economy, efficiency, and effectiveness within the NRC, and to prevent and detect fraud, waste, abuse and mismanagement in agency programs and operations.” The office also serves as the inspector general for the federal Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, the health-and-safety monitor for nuclear sites managed by the Department of Energy.
“The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s inspector general is responsible for detecting and preventing waste, fraud, and abuse, as well as mismanagement of the commission,” Barrasso said. He added: “Mr. Feitel is well qualified. He brings a wealth of experience and expertise to this important possession.”
Feitel has been a federal attorney since March 1995, working nearly the last six years in the Capital Case Section at the Justice Department, which primarily supports the Attorney General’s Review Committee on Capital Cases in determining whether to recommend the death penalty in capital cases. He also served almost 12 years as a federal prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia.
Engineering giant Jacobs said Wednesday it took in $3.4 billion in revenue during its fiscal 2020 second quarter, up from the $3.1 billion generated during the same period of 2019, despite moving most of its worldwide workforce to telework.
Thanks to rapid action since the beginning of the crisis, Jacobs expedited the shift of its 55,000-member workforce to remote operations, Chair and CEO Steve Demetriou said in a news release. Most personnel have worked remotely for about two months now, he added.
Demetriou and his management team discussed the quarter’s financial performance in a conference call with Wall Street analysts.
The company sustained a net loss of $122 million, or $0.92 per share, for its second quarter of fiscal 2020, a steep drop from net earnings of $115 million, or $0.82 per share, for the same period in fiscal 2019. That was largely due to financial accounting for the 2019 sale of its energy and chemicals business to WorleyParsons, according to the earnings material. Jacobs owns $200 million of WorleyParsons stock thanks to the transaction.
The company expects its earnings per share for fiscal 2020 in the range of $4.80 to $5.30.
Most of the company’s business sectors are affected by the coronavirus pandemic, but Jacobs expects recovery to begin in the fourth quarter of the fiscal year, according to its presentation for the call.
On March 6, 2020, Jacobs completed its acquisition of the John Wood Group’s nuclear consulting, remediation, and program management business.
“Our integration management office is well underway executing against our acquisition playbook. In-line with our playbook, the combined management structure was rolled out on day 1 and the team is executing to deliver the expected $12 million in annual cost synergies. Of course, the overall focus on the strategic logic for the combination and the strategic growth benefits also remains a high priority,” Chief Financial Officer Kevin Berryman said during the earnings call.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has knocked a year off its schedule for the review of SHINE Medical Technologies’ license application to operate its medical isotope production plant in Janesville, Wisc.
The agency had expected it would need 36 months to complete the technical review after the application was formally accepted in October 2019. The anticipated end date is now October 2021, according to an April 30 letter from Steven Lynch, a project manager in the NRC’s Non-Power Production and Utilization Facility Licensing Branch, to SHINE founder and CEO Greg Piefer.
The expedited schedule resulted from public meetings on the application in December 2019 and March of this year, regulatory audits, and additional data from SHINE, Lynch wrote.
“In the coming months, the NRC staff expects to conduct additional regulatory audits and public meetings with SHINE to further the NRC staff’s understanding of the information provided in SHINE’s operating license application, as supplemented, and promote the efficiency of the NRC staff’s review,” his letter says.
Staffers are also likely to request additional data not provided in the initial application and to further confirm that SHINE’s operations would not breach NRC rules or create hazards to human health and safety, Lynch added. In total, the agency expects to expend 22,000 work hours on reviewing the application.
SHINE’s 43,000-square-foot facility will house its accelerator-based neutron-source system for production of the isotope molybdenum-99, which decays into the isotope technetium-99m. That isotope is used widely in the United States and around the world for medical imaging.
Construction began in May 2019, with commercial output anticipated in 2022.
The Army Corps of Engineers in April issued $140 million worth of contracts to small businesses for radioactive waste cleanup and other environmental remediation services.
The contracts from the Army Corps’ Alaska District were awarded on April 22 and posted to a federal procurement website on April 28. They encompass a three-year base period, plus options for up to two more years of work.
The contract recipients are: Ahtna Engineering Services, of Anchorage, Alaska; Brice Engineering, of Anchorage; Bristol Environmental Remediation Services, of Anchorage; Cape-Weston JV2, of Anchorage; Paragon-Jacobs Joint Venture, of Anchorage; North Wind-EA JV, of Idaho Falls, Idaho; FPM Remediations, of Oneida, N.Y.; and Bethel Environmental Solutions, of Anchorage.
They will “Execute a full range of environmental remediation services including, but not limited to, investigations, studies, engineering support, remedial actions, and operation and maintenance activities related to Hazardous Toxic and Radioactive Waste (HTRW); contaminated soil, and contaminated groundwater,” according to the Army Corps.
The work largely will be done in Alaska, but could be extended to other areas within the Army Corps’ Pacific Ocean Division. The division encompasses Alaska, Hawaii, Japan, and South Korea.
There were a total of 11 bids, according to the Army Corps’ April 22 contract award report.
