The Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant has received 13,000 shipments of defense-related transuranic waste at the underground disposal site near Carlsbad, N.M., since it opened in 1999, the agency said Nov. 23.
The shipment arrived at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) Nov. 11 from the Idaho National Laboratory, which had produced more than half, or 6,605, of transuranic waste shipments to the underground salt mine to date, DOE said in a press release.
WIPP received its first shipment from another DOE site in New Mexico, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, in 1999.
As of deadline, WIPP has received 186 shipments during 2021 with the most recent shipment recorded Nov. 18, according to the agency’s public website, which posts updated figures about two weeks after the fact.
A Lexington, Ky.-based small business, EHI Consultants, on Tuesday was issued a 5-year, $4.5-million contract to continue providing support services for certain advisory boards to the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management.
The firm-fixed contract renewal for EHI to continue providing staff support for the citizen advisory boards at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio and the Paducah Site in Kentucky was announced in a press release by the Environmental Management Consolidated Business Center.
The release did not list the start-and-end dates for the new contract.
Headed by urban planner and EHI principal Edward Holmes, EHI was founded in 1995 to provide planning and design services, according to the firm’s website. EHI has offices in Lexington, Louisville, Paducah and Portsmouth. For the DOE advisory panels, EHI provides logistical, technical, administrative, and outreach services.
For the second year in a row, concern over potential spread of COVID-19 has prompted cancellation of the public deer hunt at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
“Due to COVID-19, the 2021 Deer Hunt has been cancelled,” according to a recent “deer control activities” notice posted on the Savannah River Site (SRS) website.
An SRS spokesperson confirmed before Thanksgiving this is the second straight year the deer hunt has been cancelled due to COVID-19 precautions. The DOE site would normally select hunters via lottery for the deer control hunts in November and December.
The half-day morning hunts typically begin with safety meetings at the Deer Hunt Building. “All harvested animals are tagged and brought to our check station where they are monitored for Cesium-137,” according to the website. “SRS currently has a 22 millirem per year administrative dose limit to release game animals” such as deer and feral hogs. The mission of the SRS hunt is to lower the incidence of animal-vehicle collisions on the site and reduce wild hog damage to valuable plant life, timber, and ecological research sites, according to the SRS website.
Plutonium pits, tank waste and contractor oversight again topped the Department of Energy inspector general’s list of the agency’s biggest management challenge, according to the latest edition, released before Thanksgiving.
The most recent in the rolling series of special reports, “Management Challenges at the Department of Energy,” also assigned the same top priority to DOE’s Office of Science: becoming the federal leader in artificial intelligence deployment.
As in last year’s report, DOE’s internal watchdog said that the nuclear weapons and waste agency, which contracts out more work than nearly any federal agency except the Pentagon, has a weaker contractor debarment program than agencies with smaller contracting footprints.
Over the last few years, DOE’s contractor suspensions and debarments have significantly trailed those of other agencies, the inspector general (IG) said.
Federal debarment figures for fiscal year 2020 were not available at the time of the IG’s report, but the office expected that when they are, they would be similar to the 2019 figures: five suspensions and 19 debarments. That compares with 40 suspension and 97 debarments at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which had a budget of about $42 million in 2019 — DOE had about a $30 billion budget that year.
