President Joe Biden (D) on Friday signed the fiscal year 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, setting a year’s worth of spending limits and policy for national security programs, including those at the Department of Energy.
Under the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) the National Nuclear Security Administration is authorized to spend $24 billion, or about $200 million more than the Biden administration requested. The NDAA separate from appropriations bills that provide money for federal agencies to spend. The Department of Energy is funded at 2023 levels through Jan. 19 under a temporary spending bill. The Pentagon and other agencies are funded through Feb.2, under the same bill.
The newly passed NDAA directs the NNSA, against the administration’s wishes, to continue work on a sea-launched variant of the planned W80-4 cruise-missile warhead. It also forbids expanding a plutonium disposal mission at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico until the nuclear-weapons design lab certifies that the mission will not interfere with the planned production of plutonium pits.
The Air Force’s mishandling and possibly inadequate monitoring of radioactive material over several years at the Kirtland Air Force Base is still on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s radar, a Christmas-week regulatory filing shows.
Though the Air Force has dealt with half the 14 apparent violations identified in 2022 by NRC at the base near Albuquerque, the commission is still keeping an eye on the service’s plans to track the spread of soil contaminated with thorium-232: an extremely long-lived, naturally occurring alpha-emitter found at Kirtland facilities where people are trained to detect radiation.
The western branch of National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) headquarters is also within the Kirtland fence, though that facility was not implicated in any of the 14 violations. Neither was the Defense Threat Reduction Agency’s Defense Nuclear Weapons School, another Kirtland tenant.
A federal nuclear safety watchdog for the Department of Energy defense sites this week stopped taking applications next week for a technical director to replace the one who left in July to take a job with DOE.
The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) job posting for the technical director closed on Jan. 4, 2024, according to the USA Jobs listing. The executive level position was created to make policy and manage engineers who evaluate the safety of most DOE nuclear facilities. DNFSB’s most recent technical director, Christopher Roscetti left the board over the summer to become DOE deputy director for environmental health and safety.
The position is based at the DNFSB’s Washington headquarters but is also eligible for some telework, according to the federal advertisement. The current pay scale ranges from $141,000 to $212,000.
The Daniel Poneman era ended this week at Centrus Energy Corp., when the longtime chief executive, a former Department of Energy No. 2 who took over the company after its bankruptcy restructuring, turned the reins over to ex-Orano USA president Amir Vexler.
Centrus announced the transition in November. Poneman joined Centrus in March 2015 and over eight years returned the company to profitability, Centrus said in a November statement.
Centrus brokers sales of foreign uranium fuel, much of it Russian, to U.S. utilities. The company is also developing uranium enrichment technology, including a 16-machine cascade of its AC-100M machines at the Department of Energy’s Portsmouth Site near Piketon, Ohio. The machines were one of two technologies the National Nuclear Security Administration has considered as the foundation of the next all-domestic uranium enrichment facility.
