PHOENIX – Expediting nuclear cleanup and making it less expensive is vital to the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management, a senior adviser to Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said here Monday.
Current projections indicate the Hanford Site in Washington state, which once produced plutonium for the government, won’t be fully cleaned up until somewhere between 2078 and 2091, Roger Jarrell said here at the Waste Management Symposia. Jarrell, senior adviser for Environmental Management, said the price could run into the hundreds of billions of dollars.
That is evidence the nuclear cleanup organization needs to be “leaner” and reap cost savings wherever it can, Jarreell said. Jarrell was appointed as senior adviser to DOE on Jan. 20 right after President Donald Trump started his second term.
PHOENIX —— Canada is one of the first but won’t be the last nation to successfully use “consent-based siting” to select a deep underground repository location for used nuclear fuel, the CEO of Canada’s Nuclear Waste Management Organization, said here Monday.
A “decade of engagement” was key to Canada’s Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) being able to select a site in Northwestern Ontario in November for the repository, the agency’s CEO Laurie Swami told the Waste Management Symposia.
It was a process that could not be rushed, Swami said. It focused on “consent, community and collaboration.” As a result, “Northwestern Ontario will see hundreds of new jobs and billions of dollars of investment,” Swami said. Along the way, planners had to overcome “misinformation” that is not reliable or fact-based. : If all goes according to plan, the site repository will start accepting used spent fuel in the 2040s, Swami said.
The National Nuclear Security Administration put up a notice March 6 for a solicitation of high-purity depleted uranium production on government contract database sam.gov.
While there is not much information yet on the contract, the contracting office address is listed as Albuquerque, N.M., and offers are due April 22.
Rep. Sylvester Turner (D-Texas), who was serving his first term in the House of Representatives and formerly was the mayor of Houston, died at the age of 70 on March 5 of what his family described as “enduring health complications.”
A funeral will be held for Turner this Saturday, March 15, at the Church Without Walls in Houston.
Turner was on the House Science, Space and Technology subcommittee on Energy, where recently he asked directors of the national labs in a hearing how they were all affected by President Donald Trump’s executive order ending “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs in the federal government.
