The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and Kairos Power are cooperating to develop a low-power test reactor at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee.
The government-owned electric utility, which holds an early site permit for a small modular reactor from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, will provide Kairos Power with engineering, operating and licensing help to demonstrate the Hermes reactor technology, the parties said in a Thursday news release.
The test reactor will be built on the site of the old K-33 gaseous diffusion plant within the area now known as the East Tennessee Technology Park, Kairos said previously. K-33 was a 32-acre building used for Cold War uranium enrichment from the 1950s until 1985. The DOE Office of Environmental Management turned over control of the K-31 and K-33 buildings sites to the Community Reuse Organization of East Tennessee in 2017 after both had been demolished and remediated. Kairos Power is now purchasing the 185 acres from the reuse organization, an Environmental Management spokesperson said in a Thursday email.
Kairos Power has said the proximity of the site to DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory should help the technology company advance its fluoride salt-cooled, high-temperature reactor.
Kairos Power received $30 million in funding in fiscal 2020 through DOE’s advanced reactor demonstration program. Thursday’s announcement did not include a proposed timeline for the Hermes reactor project.
The Department of Energy and its legacy cleanup contractor at the Los Alamos National Laboratory said this week an interim groundwater pump-and-treat system to contain a hexavalent chromium plume is now fully operational.
Three extraction wells and two injection wells that came online this month are part of what DOE dubbed an “interim measure” to control the mile-long chromium plume, the agency said in a Tuesday press release. The interim setup now has five extraction and five injection wells overseen by environmental contractor Newport News Nuclear BWXT-Los Alamos (N3B).
An N3B official told the online Waste Management Symposia in March he was relieved to see the chromium plume did not grow worse during about three months during the first half of 2020 when Los Alamos operations scaled back significantly due to COVID-19 precautions.
Thus far, the interim measure has been successful in pushing the plume back about 500 feet from the laboratory’s border with the Pueblo de San Ildefonso tribal lands, according to the DOE release.
“While we have a number of environmental remediation activities underway as part of the Consent Order with NMED [New Mexico Environment Department], the effort to pull back the plume from the laboratory’s boundary with the Pueblo de San Ildefonso has been our highest Consent Order priority,” the DOE Office of Environmental Management’s federal cleanup director at Los Alamos, Cheryl Rodriguez, said in the agency release.
The chromium plume was discovered in 2005 about 1,000 feet belowground. Chromium was often used to slow corrosion at Los Alamos between the 1950s and the 1970s and was occasionally flushed from the plant’s cooling towers into Sandia Canyon, according to DOE. Over time the chromium seeped into the regional aquifer beneath Sandia and Mortandad canyons.
The DOE and its contractor expect to identify a “final remedy” for the chromium plume next year and submit it for regulatory approval, the agency recently said in a set of 10-year goals for the Environmental Management office.
In a move that has been in the works for some time, Irving, Texas-based Fluor has sold its North American equipment business, AMECO, to One Equity Partners for $73 million.
Fluor announced the transaction in a Tuesday morning press release. The engineering and construction company first put AMECO up for sale in September 2019 at the same time it was entertaining offers for its government contracting segment, which quarterbacks business opportunities with the Department of Energy businesses.
In early 2020 Fluor would decide to keep its government contracting business. The company has moved ahead, however, with selling its AMECO units. Last August it announced the sale of its AMECO Caribbean equipment rental business for $22 million.
AMECO leases vehicles, construction equipment, support services, and related services to various industries and government agencies, the company said on its website. One Equity Partners is a private equity firm with over $6 billion in assets under its control, according to the firm’s website.
HukariAscendent, a nuclear engineering and technical services firm, has promoted Jason Lawless to chief operating officer.
Lawless, who has been with the Colorado-based veteran-owned small business for more than 12 years, most recently served as vice president of business operations, the company announced in a press release. Lawless started his new position March 22.
Lawless recently relocated to Tennessee and will open up a HukariAscendent office in the Oak Ridge area, according to the press release. Lawless has much experience in Department of Energy projects and will be responsible for day-to-day management of staff, offices and operations.
In his new role, Lawless will continue to report to CEO Ken Hukari.
According to its website, HukariAscendent has worked on DOE projects at the Hanford Site in Washington state, the Idaho National Laboratory, the Rocky Flats cleanup project in Colorado, the Nevada Nuclear Security Site, the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
