Honeywell this month marked its 75th year of work at what is now the Kansas City National Security Campus in Kansas City, Mo. Run by the National Nuclear Security Administration today, the campus relocated in 2014 from the old Bannister Federal Complex, portions of which were scheduled for transfer to the Department of Energy’s Office of Legacy Management in 2026, according to the office.
Bannister was the manufacturing hub for the non-nuclear parts of nuclear weapons for much of the atomic age. That mission moved to the current Kansas City campus about 10 years ago, when most DOE people relocated out of Bannister. In 2017, the agency turned over much of the old Bannister complex to a private development firm.
NNSA Administrator Jill Hruby spoke this week in Las Vegas during a scheduled information day about clean energy at the Nevada National Security Site, the U.S. nuclear-weapons testing site. The Department of Energy plans to issue a final request for qualifications for the project in March.
“NNSA has been concerned with nuclear war as an existential threat,” Hruby said in her prepared remarks. “However, more recently, we have also come to recognize a second potential existential threat in climate change.”
The U.S. and Bulgaria on Feb. 12 signed an intergovernmental agreement to help the Balkan nation build a new 1,000-megawatt reactor at the Kozloduy Nuclear Power Plant on the banks of the Danube River in northwestern Bulgaria near the border with Romania, the U.S. embassy in Bulgaria announced.
The plant is about 60 miles northwest by road from the Bulgarian city of Pleven. The agreement builds on a 2020 memorandum between the two countries and includes other aspects of civilian nuclear power in Bulgaria, a member of the European Union that borders Greece, Turkey and the Black Sea.
Jonpaul Payne, a 27 year-old man, on Feb. 10 drove through a security checkpoint at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., the Oak Ridge Police Department wrote in a Facebook post that afternoon.
Payne, of Lenior City, Tenn., was jailed by the Anderson County Sheriff’s Department and charged among other things with theft, vandalism and possession of drug paraphernalia, according to a list of current inmates at the jail accessed on Friday. Lenior City is about 25 miles by road from Y-12.
Craig Olson, a physicist who in the course of a 30-year career at the Sandia National Laboratories that began in 1970 ran the labs’ Beam, Plasma and EM Theory Department and was the manager for the Z-Pinch Inertial Fusion Energy program, died Feb. 3, according to an obituary posted online.
He was 81. The obituary did not provide a cause of death or say where Olson died.
