Sen. Roger Wicker, (R-Miss.), ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Rep. Mike Rogers, (R-Ala.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, on Friday sent a letter to Strategic Command (STRATCOM), “demanding a full accounting of why an Iranian propagandist and former regime official participated as a keynote speaker in a STRATCOM-sponsored event.”
Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a former spokesman for the Iranian nuclear negotiating team and a former senior staffer for the regime’s Supreme National Security Council, was a featured participant in the August 2023 STRATCOM Deterrence Symposium.
“In addition to Mousavian’s former posts supporting the regime, he continues to demonstrate sympathy and support for the adversarial government,” the lawmakers wrote in their letter. “In 2020, Mousavian termed Iranian terrorist Qassem Soleimani a “hero fighting terrorism” and has repeatedly mocked American officials living under the threat of assassination by Iranian-backed actors because of their role in formulating tough-on-Iran policies.”
Sandia Field Office Deputy Manager David Pugh handed over the keys to the former NNSA Albuquerque Complex to Col. Elizabeth Keller, deputy commander, 377th Air Base Wing, at New Mexico’s Kirtland Air Force Base on Aug 29.
In 1947, when the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission took over the nation’s atomic energy program from the Army’s Manhattan Engineer District, the commission — precursor to the NNSA and Department of Energy — was assigned the mission of nuclear weapons research, development, testing, production and storage.
During a major expansion of the weapons program in the late 1950s, the organization moved into surplus barracks at Sandia Base which became the Albuquerque Operations Office. The barracks, which were constructed in 1951 and 1952, housed the employees of the Atomic Energy Commission for 64 years until the nearly 1,200 DOE and NNSA employees moved to a new facility on Kirtland last July — the John A.Gordon Albuquerque Complex. Now that the buildings have been returned to the Air Force, Kirtland plans to use some of the buildings for “current mission activities” and demolish the buildings that are uninhabitable, the Air Force said.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) staff will hold a public meeting Sept. 7 in Piketon, Ohio, to discuss the agency’s licensing and oversight of Centrus/American Centrifuge operations of the American Centrifuge Plant.
The discussion will focus primarily on Centrus’ enrichment of high-assay low-enriched uranium, or HALEU, for use in nuclear power plants.
Those unable to attend in person can participate online in the meeting that will be held from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. Eastern time at the Pike County Career and Technology Center, 175 Beaver Creek Road in Piketon.
NRC staff will discuss the NRC and Department of Energy’s roles for the plant and the Piketon site, as well as recent licensing and oversight activities related to HALEU. Staff from DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy also will make a short presentation on the need for HALEU, after which staff from both agencies will answer questions from the public.
Turtles inhabiting near sites where the U.S. exploded nuclear weapons retain uranium in their shells from when the bombs were detonated, a new study found.
Using a mass spectrometer, researchers detected minuscule levels of uranium in the shells of four turtles, including one sea turtle and a land-based tortoise, that lived near such sites before they were collected as natural history specimens between the 1950s and 1980s, Scientific American reports.
Two of the turtle-shell samples were taken from production sites and two from detonation sites and in all four “the scientists matched the signatures of uranium isotopes in the shells to the distinct profiles produced by each of these two types of nuclear activity. … In one of the turtle shells, the researchers traced varying levels of uranium in individual concentric layers that formed like tree rings and tracked the animal’s uranium uptake over time.”
