Atkins-led Mid-America Conversion Services has 30 days to contest $382,500 in Department of Energy fines stemming from allegations that the contractor failed to ensure a crane used in Depleted Uranium Hexafluoride Conversion at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio was maintained in a safe manner.
The contractor “has not acknowledged these nuclear safety deficiencies, they have not conducted a causal analysis or taken appropriate corrective actions to prevent recurrence,” DOE Office of Enterprise Assessments’ Office of Enforcement said in a Feb. 20 letter to Mid-America President Dutch Conrad. A spokesperson for AtkinsRéalis, Mid-America’s lead partner, declined comment Friday.
Mid-America failed to “determine and prevent” the factors that led to recurrence of the factors that allowed a crane to be used beyond its inspection due date, according to DOE, which also said the contractor did not do enough to blunt potential human error.
Interested subcontractors now have two more months, until April 18, to pursue work refurbishing an underground pipeline connecting double-shell tanks at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state.
DOE and its tank management prime Washington River Protection Solutions on Wednesday published an extension of the deadline for interested parties to respond to its earlier expression of interest. The old deadline was Feb. 19.
There is about 10 miles of underground pipeline, much of it dating to the 1960s, which connects the affected tanks. There is an estimated 56 million gallons of radioactive and hazardous waste left over from decades of plutonium production and held in underground tanks at Hanford. DOE expects to start converting some of the less radioactive tank waste into a solid glass form starting in 2025 at the Bechtel-built Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant.
Thanks to some unspent funds, environmental work at the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory could continue for about three weeks if the federal government goes “into shutdown mode,” Connie Flohr, who heads DOE’s Idaho Cleanup Project, told a federal advisory panel Thursday.
Flohr, who is soon leaving DOE to take an industry job, told the Idaho Citizens Advisory Board the current budget process is a big “jumbled up mess.” DOE and other agencies would move into a government shutdown if Congress fails to pass a budget bill, or another continuing resolution, when the current one expires March 1.
The timing of a congressional appropriation package for fiscal 2024, which started Oct. 1, 2023, could affect expansion of a low-level radioactive waste landfill at the Idaho National Laboratory. “You can’t be digging up a cell in January,” Flohr said.
The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration is shopping around for a new Nevada Field Office headquarters in greater Las Vegas, a federal advisory board heard Wednesday evening.
Jill Hruby, who heads DOE’s semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration, is slated to meet with Las Vegas officials next week in Washington, D.C., to discuss a potential office relocation for staff of the Nevada National Security Site field office, the Nevada Site-Specific Advisory Board heard at its Wednesday meeting.
The Feb. 27 meeting with Hruby “concerns the potential move from our North Las Vegas facility to a potential site in northwest Las Vegas,” said John Daniels, the public affairs officer for the Nevada National Security Site, located 65 miles north of the city. An NNSA spokesperson said by email Thursday about 1,300 people work in the current North Las Vegas campus, which is a 1960s era facility. The search for a new office complex is in the early stages, the spokesperson said.
The Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., is turning 25 years old.
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) received its first shipment of defense-related transuranic waste on March 26, 1999. As of Feb. 5, the underground salt mine has disposed of 13,843 total shipments of transuranic waste, according to a Thursday DOE presentation to the Idaho National Laboratory Citizens Advisory Board for nuclear cleanup. WIPP was offline for nearly three years following a February 2014 accident where a drum overheated and ruptured, causing an underground radiation leak.
DOE and its prime contractor, Bechtel’s Salado Isolation Mining Contractors, this week released a WIPP 25th anniversary video.
