The legacy cleanup contractor for the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico said recently it has completed the multi-million-dollar remediation of Middle DP Road in Los Alamos County.
Newport News Nuclear BWXT Los Alamos (N3B) said late last month that recent sampling confirmed “contamination removal and cleanup is complete,” according to an online update.
Workers are now finishing field work, which includes removal of a Los Alamos County debris pile, N3B went on to say. The contractor team is continuing to ship the excavated low-level radioactive waste from the road site to a disposal facility, and field work should be wrapped up within weeks. An assessment report on the project is being prepared, N3B said. N3B has previously said it expected to wrap up the Middle DP Road cleanup this year at a cost of about $19 million, according to a Government Accountability Office report.
Idaho-based North Wind Group has appointed Jeff Dulgarian as its new Northeast regional director, the Department of Energy contractor said last week.
Dulgarian was previously deputy Northeast regional manager as well as head of operations for North Wind Site Services, according to the company’s Oct. 3 press release. He spent the past five years with North Wind and has 25 years of experience in environmental cleanup and large construction projects.
Dulgarian is a former president of the Boston Post of the Society of American Military Engineers. He has been an Army Reserve member for 25 years and recently earned his master’s degree in National Security and Strategic Studies. North Wind currently has environmental contracts at DOE’s Moab uranium tailings project in Utah and the Energy Technology Engineering Center at the Santa Susana National Field Laboratory in California.
Huntington Ingalls Industries last week elected retired U.S. Navy Admiral Craig Faller to its board of directors, the company said in a press release.
After servicing 38 years in the Navy, Faller retired from the service in 2021, Huntington Ingalls said in a press release. His most recent Navy service was as commander of the U.S. Southern Command, in which he coordinated U.S. military partnerships with Latin American and Caribbean security forces. Faller has also been senior military assistant to the secretary of defense, chief of legislative affairs for the Navy, and director of operations for the U.S. Central Command.
The United Kingdom’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority has appointed Rob Fletcher as the permanent CEO of Magnox Limited, the authority said in a recent press release.
Fletcher has been acting Magnox chief executive since May, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) said in the press release. Fletcher permanently fills the vacancy created when Gwen Parry-Jones OBE left the Magnox helm to head Great British Nuclear, the country’s nuclear redevelopment organization.
According to his biography, Fletcher is a 35-year nuclear professional who serves as an adviser to the nation’s Atomic Energy Authority’s fusion reactor program. He has held a number of executive-level jobs with Rolls-Royce and its nuclear business. Magnox, a subsidiary of NDA, is responsible for remediating a dozen nuclear sites.
Centrus Energy Corp. started enriching energy dense uranium fuel using a new centrifuge cascade at the Department of Energy’s Portsmouth Site near Piketon, Ohio, the company said Wednesday.
Centrus, Bethesda, Md., marked the milestone with a tour of the event that included Deputy Secretary of Energy David Turk. The company thinks it will begin retrieving low enriched high assay uranium, or HALEU, from its Piketon centrifuges “this month,” according to a press release.
Centrus is making the HALEU for DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy under the second of two contracts the office has cut with the company to produce the fuel, which is 19.75% uranium-235 by mass. The first phase of the current contract’s two-year base period calls for Centrus to produce 20 kilograms of HALEU for DOE’s inspection by Dec. 31. If DOE approves the sample, Centrus would be on the hook to produce 900 kilograms by December 2024 in the base period’s second phase.
