The Southern Bench fire, which burned about 1,000 acres since late August, has been put out by firefighters from the Department of Energy’s Nevada National Security Site and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, the operations contractor for the Nevada Site said this week.
The Southern Bench wildland fire is now “fully contained and extinguished,” according to a Tuesday press release from Mission Support and Test Services, the Honeywell-led management and operations contractor for the Nevada Site.
The fire did not burn in any contaminated areas, according to the press release. No structures were damaged and no injuries were reported.
The Nevada National Security Site Fire & Rescue Department first responded Aug. 24 to a wildland fire burning north of Area 12. The fire has been controlled, and not burned additional acreage since Aug. 30, according to the federal contractor.
The big fire affecting the sprawling federal property in 2021 has been the Cherrywood Fire, which charred more than 26,000 acres at the former test site.
Nobody was hurt Monday morning when a truck caught fire in the 200 East Area of the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state, according to a notice posted on the website for the federal property.
The fire occurred under the hood of the truck loaded with an empty container from the Site’s Environmental Restoration Disposal Facility. The truck caught fire near the Effluent Treatment Facility. The Hanford Fire Department quickly put out the fire in the engine compartment of the truck and the driver was not hurt.
The Tri-City Herald newspaper reported the story Monday
The empty container, used to transport non-radioactive debris such as construction material, was located in the rear of the truck and was undamaged by the fire.
The DOE declined to say what entity at Hanford employs the driver of the truck.
The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board has appointed Leigh Lin as one of its resident inspectors at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina, according to a press release.
Lin joined Zachary McCabe, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board’s (DNFSB) current resident inspector at Savannah River, on Sept. 13, according to the Monday press release from the board’s executive Director of Operations Joel Spangenberg.
As a resident inspector, Lin advises DNFSB on overall safety conditions of defense nuclear facilities at Savannah River and takes part in board reviews concerning design, construction, operation and decommissioning of the nuclear facilities there. Lin has been with DNFSB’s technical staff since 2012, working on technical reviews. As part of the technical staff, she also worked as a DNFSB cognizant engineer for both Savannah River and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.
Before arriving at DNFSB, Lin did research in nuclear materials and radiochemistry at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois and at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington state near the DOE’s Hanford Site. She has a master’s in nuclear engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Thomas Mooney, a former federal supervisor who served in executive jobs at the Pentagon and the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management, is now a strategic account manager for energy at Leidos, according to his LinkedIn portfolio.
Mooney, who joined Leidos in August, spent nearly two years at DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, serving as its chief of staff and chief operating officer before leaving in August, according to the online biography.
Before that, Mooney spent about three years at the Department of Defense as chief of staff to the chief management officer as well as a deputy White House liaison. He has also worked as logistics management consultant and a special assistant at the Department of the Army headquarters.
John Dorrian will retire from Centrus Energy Corp., Bethesda, Md., on Dec. 31, after 27 years with the company, most recently as controller and chief accounting officer, the uranium fuel broker and enrichment technology developer announced in a recent regulatory filing.
“It is anticipated that Mr. Dorrian will continue to provide transition services to the Company on a part-time basis in early 2022,” Centrus wrote in Tuesday’s 8-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Centrus, the former U.S. Enrichment Corp., is in the middle of a high-assay, low-enriched uranium technology demonstration for the Department of Energy that could give the company a long-term boost as the provider of the first all-domestic enrichment technology since the Paducah enrichment plant shut down in 2013, just prior to the U.S. Enrichment Corp. bankruptcy reorganization into Centrus.
The technology demonstration, and the company’s bedrock uranium brokerage business, has drawn occasional ire from Congress this year and in years past, mostly from states that host foreign-owned enrichment facilities or natural uranium mines.
The Department of Energy’s cleanup branch is following recommendations made by the Government Accountability Office in a May 2020 report on tracking progress at the Waste Treatment Plant at the Hanford Site in Washington state, the federal watchdog agency said Thursday.
In April, the DOE Office of Environmental Management said it “will include life cycle cost estimates consistent with ‘best practices and DOE guidance’” when looking at alternatives for treating Hanford’s high-level waste, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in a Thursday update on the report. Hanford is considering alternatives, such as tank-side cesium removal, to the Pretreatment Facility. Construction of the Pretreatment Facility is on hold and probably won’t be done by a 2031 deadline.
The 2020 report said DOE should work closely with the Washington state Department of Ecology while vetting alternatives. In its April reply, the DOE Office of Environmental Management said it would “continue to include Ecology” in reviewing alternatives
The Waste Treatment Plant is scheduled to start converting low-level tank waste into a stable glass form for disposal by the end of 2023. There are about 56 million gallons of radioactive tank waste in 177 underground tanks at Hanford, the remnants of decades of plutonium production. Most of the waste is low-level.
