Brent Park
President Donald J. Trump on Thursday nominated a national security leader at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to a nuclear nonproliferation job in the U.S. Department of Energy.
Brent K. Park is currently an associate laboratory director at ORNL, where he is responsible for national security programs.
Trump nominated him to be deputy administrator for defense nuclear nonproliferation in the Department of Energy. [Read more…]
The Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge is pictured above in June 2012. (Photo courtesy NNSA)
Note: This story was last updated at 4:20 p.m.
Funding for the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge would be up about 25 percent under the budget request submitted to Congress in May, according to the National Nuclear Security Administration.
The total funding for Y-12 would be $1.64 billion, the NNSA said. That’s an increase of 25.4 percent over fiscal year 2016.
The budget request for fiscal year 2018, which starts October 1, was submitted by President Donald Trump to Congress on Tuesday, May 23. The NNSA request of $13.9 billion would increase funding by 7.8 percent compared to fiscal year 2017, Administrator Frank G. Klotz said during a teleconference with reporters on May 23.
Trump’s budget request has not yet been approved by Congress, where there has been bipartisan opposition, particularly to the proposed cuts. In Oak Ridge, sites and programs that could be cut include Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which would have a funding reduction of $206 million over two years, and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, or EERE.
But Y-12, a National Nuclear Security Administration site, could benefit if the president’s budget request were approved by Congress. A House spending bill introduced last week for federal energy and water departments appears to include proposed spending levels for the NNSA, a semi-autonomous agency within DOE, that are similar to what the Trump administration has proposed. [Read more…]
Federal officials have denied the third protest by one of the two teams that unsuccessfully bid on a $22 billion contract to manage the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, pictured above, and Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas.
Note: This story was updated at 6:45 p.m.
Federal officials have denied the third protest by one of the two teams that unsuccessfully bid on a $22 billion contract to manage the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge and Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas.
In the protest, Nuclear Production Partners LLC of Lynchburg, Va., had challenged a November decision by the National Nuclear Security Administration to reaffirm its earlier decision, announced in January 2013, to award the consolidated contract to Consolidated Nuclear Security LLC of Reston, Va.
On Thursday, the U.S. Government Accountability Office announced that it had denied the third protest. It’s the final GAO protest, but the case could be appealed to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in Washington, D.C.
Statistically, that’s not likely; the GAO hears 2,500 protests per year, and the court has about 84. But there is a large amount of money at stake with this contract.
The GAO had upheld one part of an earlier NP2 protest and denied or dismissed three elements of a second. [Read more…]
WASHINGTON, D.C.— The National Nuclear Security Administration, in partnership with the Russian Federation, has successfully completed the removal of 14 Russian radioisotope thermoelectric generators, or RTGs, from the Northern Sea Route. These devices, which contain high-activity radioactive sources, powered navigational beacons along Russia’s northern coastline. With this removal, the U.S. Department of Energy has completed its efforts to recover RTGs along the Northern Sea Route, a press release said.
RTGs were used for many years in Russia to generate electrical power at remote locations, including lighthouses and navigational beacons. The 14 RTGs recently recovered by DOE contain more than one million curies of strontium-90, a high-activity radioisotope that could be used in a dirty bomb. [Read more…]
