AIKEN, South Carolina -- Contractors for the U.S. Department of Energy at Savannah River Site have cut nearly 1,550 jobs over two years.

The Aiken Standard reports Sunday that about 11,100 people worked for contractors at the site last December. Workforce reports show that's down from 12,630 two years earlier.

Spokesman Bill Taylor says the federal stimulus created a lot of jobs starting in 2010, but that money is gone.

The site has five major contractors. Two of the five posted some growth.

The contractor that manages the site took the biggest hit. Savannah River Nuclear Solutions lost nearly 1,600 workers over the two years.

The Hanford vitrification plant is hiring construction workers as a second shift is added at its Low Activity Waste Facility.

About 50 building trades workers have been hired and will start work Monday, according to Bechtel National. More hiring is expected. Most of the jobs are for electricians and pipefitters, but some other construction workers also are needed.

The basic structure of the building has been completed, and enough work is ready to be done to bring in more workers, according to Bechtel. Construction on the building, one of the four large buildings on the vit plant campus, is about 60 percent complete.

The plant's schedule is being revised but the Low Activity Waste Facility is expected to be finished in the next couple of years. The plant is legally required to start treating radioactive waste for disposal in 2019.

The U.S. Department of Justice plans to join a federal lawsuit against Washington Closure Hanford and two subcontractors that alleges unfair practices in the award of Hanford subcontracts.

The lawsuit was filed by Savage Logistics of Richland and its owner, Salina Savage, in 2010, after the company failed to win a bid.

Savage named Washington Closure and Federal Engineers and Constructors of Richland as defendants. The Department of Justice is adding new defendants Sage Tec and Sage Tec's owner, Laura Shikashio.

The department will have 120 days from Aug. 8 to file a legal complaint against the defendants detailing specific allegations, which may not include all of Savage's allegations.

Savage alleged that Federal Engineers and Constructors, or FE&C, conspired with Washington Closure to rig bids and misrepresent the size and independence of subcontractors bidding on Washington Closure work.

That would allow FE&C to continue performing work and getting paid, while Washington Closure could satisfy Department of Energy requirements to subcontract work to small and disadvantaged companies.

FE&C co-owner Dick French described Savage's lawsuit as "frivolous" in 2011.

FE&C has not reviewed the most recent complaint and does not know what allegations Justice plans to pursue, but believes that Savage's allegations are without merit, said FE&C attorney Jessica Blankenship.

"We will continue to vigorously defend the company against her accusations, as we have been doing for the past two years," she said.

The Department of Justice has not indicated which subcontract awarded to Sage Tec is of concern. Some of the court documents are sealed. The Herald was unable to find a working phone number for Sage Tec or its owner.

However, Sage Tec teamed with FE&C to win a Washington Closure subcontract worth up to $5.3 million in 2010. The subcontract covered digging up soil contaminated with chromium near Hanford's C Reactor down to 85 feet deep.

FE&C allegedly sought out small business subcontractors that could serve as front companies to bid on subcontracts set aside for companies smaller than FE&C, the lawsuit said.

It first approached Total Site Services, which refused to become involved, according to court documents. Then it set up an FE&C employee, Jonetta Everano, in business as Phoenix Enterprises Northwest.

Four months after the company was formed, Phoenix won a Washington Closure "truck and pup" subcontract worth about $4.8 million to haul contaminated material to a central Hanford landfill. When the bid was awarded, Phoenix had the same address as FE&C, and FE&C was to perform all operations under the subcontract, the lawsuit said.

The Small Business Administration later determined that Phoenix was affiliated with FE&C, and that FE&C had more than $14 million in receipts, making it too large to be considered for the bid as advertised. Washington Closure said earlier that it did not report the subcontract to DOE as part of meeting its small business subcontracting requirements.

FE&C knew that the subcontract would be extended to 67 weeks, which was information not available to Savage Logistics, the lawsuit said. If Savage Logistics had known the true length of the contract, it would have submitted a bid that was at least $300,000 lower than the winning bid.

Washington Closure favored Phoenix because Everano had previously worked for Washington Closure, and Washington Closure extended the bid dates to help her, the lawsuit said. The extension allowed her company to file documents claiming to be a woman-owned business and complete an agreement with FE&C to provide the company financing, offices, trucks and bonding to bid on the work.

The Department of Justice indicated in court documents that it will not pursue legal action against Phoenix or Everano, who were named in the original complaint.

Everano made repeated requests at FE&C to be allowed to start her own company, FE&C's co-owner, French, said in a 2012 court document. FE&C originally agreed to be a 49 percent owner of Phoenix, but Everano bought that portion of the company. FE&C was paid a total of $265,515 by Phoenix, a small part of the $4.8 million truck and pup contract.

URS Corp. named a new president Tuesday for Savannah River Remediation, the liquid-waste contractor for Savannah River Site.
 
Ken Rueter, as both president and project manager, will replace Dave Olson, who was recently named president of the URS-led consortium Washington River Protection Solutions at the Department of Energy's Hanford site in Richland, Wash.
 
Savannah River Remediation is responsible for the closing of radioactive waste tanks, the operation of the Defense Waste Processing Facility, and associated waste facilities.
 
Before joining SRR, Rueter served as chief operating officer of UCOR (URS|CH2M Oak Ridge), a URS-led consortium at the government's East Tennessee Technology Park in Oak Ridge, Tenn., responsible for cleanup and environmental remediation.

Savannah River Site has completed a seven-year effort to adopt a new, top-secret computer system that keeps track of tritium reservoirs used in nuclear warheads.

The radioactive gas, which amplifies explosive power, has a half-life of about 12½ years. When tritium "reservoirs" in warheads require recharging, the stainless steel components are shipped to SRS, where recycled and newly extracted tritium is loaded into the containers.
 
The previous tracking program, known as Automated Reservoir Management System, or ARMS, had been in use more than 20 years and relied upon outdated technology, so the solution was a multi-year project to implement its modern replacement: ARMS II.
 
The system, with more than 200 users throughout the National Nuclear Security Administration's nuclear arms facilities, tracks reservoirs throughout their life cycle and maintains real-time records of when components are processed or shipped from SRS, and when they should be returned based on their age.
 
The conversion required migrating more than 18 million historical records, according to site officials.
 
The transition also required a four-week outage, coordinated with other nuclear weapons sites, to allow migration of so much data to the new system.
 
Savannah River Site's tritium program, which employs about 450 workers, is one of the last nuclear weapons functions still based at the South Carolina facility.
 
In addition to servicing the warhead reservoirs, SRS workers conduct performance tests on gas transfer systems randomly selected from the active stockpile to ensure performance without the need for nuclear testing.
 
In these critical tests, a valve fires to open a hole in the reservoir fill stem, and workers must verify that the fill gas is delivered.
 
The reservoirs are also exposed to extreme forces potentially experienced during use, including thermal changes, vibration, centrifugal force and drop tests. Workers also extract tritium from fuel rods produced at Tennessee Valley Authority reactors and from both surplus and active warhead reservoirs.
 
Though the number of nuclear warheads in the U.S. arsenal has fallen in recent decades, the total stockpile still includes about 4,650, of which an estimated 2,150 are deployed, according to a 2013 report by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

On Tuesday, construction began in Texas on what will be the largest wind farm in the United States -- and one that is to play a role in nuclear weapons work, Time reported.
 
Instead of providing green energy to surrounding towns and municipalities, the wind farm's five 2.3 megawatt wind turbines will contribute power to the Pantex plant, a facility "charged with securing America by providing the nation's nuclear deterrent," the news service quotes the facility's website as stating. The U.S. government uses Pantex for the assembly and disassembly of atomic warheads.
 
The project "will be funded by the energy savings guaranteed by Siemens," Pantex has said. Savings are estimated to be around $50 million over an 18-year period, according to Time.
 
"The Pantex wind farm is projected to generate approximately 47 million [kilowatt hours] of clean energy annually, which is greater than 65 percent of Pantex's annual electricity needs," Time cites Pantex as saying. Additionally, the plant will reduce carbon dioxide emissions by over 35,000 metric tons per year.
 
Earlier in the year, the Amarillo-based plant was under scrutiny from auditors, who warned that an aging security system at the nuclear-weapon facility could become dysfunctional. 

Nowadays the federal government leavens its usual quotient of incompetence with large dollops of illegality. This is eliciting robust judicial rebukes, as when, last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia instructed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to stop "flouting the law." Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh said: "It is no overstatement to say that our constitutional system of separation of powers would be significantly altered if we were to allow executive and independent agencies to disregard federal law in the manner asserted in this case."

For six decades the nation has been studying the challenge of safely storing nuclear waste from weapons production, Navy vessels and civilian power plants. So far, more than $15 billion has been spent developing a waste repository system (in the 1980s, a Nevada senator misnamed it a waste "suppository") deep within Yucca Mountain 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 says the NRC "shall consider" the Yucca Mountain application to become a repository, and "shall" approve or disapprove the application within three years of its submission. "Shall" means "must." The application, submitted in June 2008, has not been acted upon, and the court said: "By its own admission, the Commission has no current intention of complying with the law."

Judge A. Raymond Randolph's concurring opinion said: "Former (NRC) Chairman Gregory Jaczko orchestrated a systematic campaign of noncompliance. Jaczko unilaterally ordered Commission staff to terminate the review process in October 2010; instructed staff to remove key findings from reports evaluating the Yucca Mountain site; and ignored the will of his fellow Commissioners."

Jaczko resigned last year, leaving the NRC in demoralized disarray. The New York Times reported "charges of mismanagement and verbal abuse of subordinates" and that all four of his fellow commissioners, two from each party, complained about Jaczko to the White House and told a congressional committee that (the Times reported) he "unprofessionally berated the agency's professional staff and reduced female employees to tears with his comments."

To be fair to him, he was put there to disrupt. He was put there by Nevada's Sen. Harry Reid (D), on whose staff he had served.

Reid seems uninterested in the metallurgy of waste containment vessels or the geology of the mountain's 40 miles of storage tunnels where the waste would be stored 1,000 feet underground on 1,000 feet of rock. Rather, Reid, like almost all Nevadans, regards the repository as a threat to Las Vegas, a gambling destination that lives off tourists who are demonstrably irrational about probabilities. Reid prefers the status quo -- more than 160 million Americans living within 75 miles of one or more of the 121 locations where more than 70,000 tons of nuclear waste are kept.

The court, which was concerned only with the law, not the mountain, said, "The President must follow statutory mandates so long as there is appropriated money available and the President has no constitutional objection to the statute." He has none, and Reid has not yet quite succeeded in starving the NRC of funding for the Yucca licensing process.

The NRC said Congress has not yet appropriated the full amount required to complete the process. The court said Congress often appropriates "on a step-by-step basis." The NRC speculated that Congress may not finish appropriating the sums necessary. The court said that allowing agencies to ignore statutory mandates based on "speculation" about future congressional decisions "would gravely upset the balance of powers between the [government's] Branches and represent a major and unwarranted expansion of the Executive's power at the expense of Congress."

The NRC said small appropriations indicate Congress's desire to stop the licensing process. The court responded that "Congress speaks through the laws it enacts" and "courts generally should not infer that Congress has implicitly repealed or suspended statutory mandates based simply on the amount of money Congress has appropriated." The court noted that, "as a policy matter," the NRC may want to block the Yucca project but "Congress sets the policy, not the Commission." And the court said there is no permissible executive discretion to disregard "statutory obligations that apply to the Executive Branch."

This episode is a snapshot of contemporary Washington -- small, devious people putting their lawlessness in the service of their parochialism and recklessly sacrificing public safety and constitutional propriety. One can only marvel at the measured patience with which the court has tried to teach the obvious to the willfully obtuse.