In a long-awaited legal settlement over six years of mislabeled, radioactive waste shipments to Nevada, the Department of Energy agreed to tighten waste-inspection standards at nuclear weapon sites and overhaul its solid waste permit with the state by early next year, Carson City’s top environmental official said this week.
DOE will also have to revise the Nevada National Security Site’s (NNSS) waste acceptance criteria to include the settlement’s prescribed “waste management improvements,” according to the text of the agreement provided Tuesday to Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor by the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection (NDEP).
The 55-page settlement, with its five appendices, aims to prevent the DOE from again shipping mislabeled radioactive waste to the NNSS’ Area 5 Radioactive Waste Management Complex. DOE has to apply for a new solid-waste permit with Nevada by Jan. 18 and present NDEP with a draft of the revised waste acceptance criteria for the desert test site by Oct. 20, according to the settlement.
“This is a settlement that, looking forward, is placing a greatly increased emphasis for the Department of Energy to rely increasingly on physical and chemical verification for waste characterization and waste verification and validation,” Greg Lovato, NDEP administrator, told the Monitor in a video interview Wednesday.
While the settlement revolves around shipments of low-level waste and NDEP’s ability to regulate such material through the solid waste permit it gave DOE, the settlement unveiled this week shows the Silver State successfully agitated for changes both to solid waste streams and mixed-low-level waste streams regulated separately under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act.
In 10 shipments between 2013 and 2018, the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., which makes nuclear-weapon secondary stages for DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration, sent 33 packages of 10 shipments of classified, weapons-related materials to Area 5.
The materials were labeled as low-level waste but contained pressure vessels filled with inert gasses, according to the settlement. That violated the area’s waste acceptance criteria, the Nevada Program at DOE’s Office of Environmental Management determined in 2019, and violating the acceptance criteria violated the agency’s solid waste permit with Nevada, Lovato said.
“[E]ven though the waste acceptance criteria is adopted and formed by DOE’s self-regulating authority under the Atomic Energy Act, it was incorporated into our solid waste permit as a part of the waste analysis plan and so we interpreted that we had authority over this disposal,” Lovato told the the Monitor.
DOE did not admit or deny Lovato’s contention in the settlement, which went into effect June 22.
Lovato called NDEP’s solid waste permit the state’s “regulatory hook” for the settlement, but the agreement calls for changes both to solid and hazardous waste disposal at NNSS. Among the changes, the contents of at least 10% of the waste containers from new DOE waste streams, or waste streams whose characteristics DOE revises, will have to be verified by chemical or physical means before they can be shipped to an NNSS disposal cell covered by DOE’s Resource Recovery and Conservation Act permit with NDEP.
Solid waste streams at NNSA also “will include physical and/or chemical verification methods” from now on, according to the settlement. That could mean opening a package and looking inside it before shipping it out, performing real-time radiography on a shipment or sampling a package’s contents for chemical analysis at the generator site.
When news of the mislabeled shipments broke in 2019, Nevada officials believed the packages inappropriately sent to NNSS might have been mixed low-level waste with hazardous materials, as defined by federal law.
“[W]e determined it was not” mixed low-level waste, Lovato said, but “we interpreted that we had authority over this disposal even though it’s low-level waste, because it was incorporated into our permit.”
The settlement also called for DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration “to transfer funds to NDEP in the amount of $65,000.00 (Sixty-five Thousand Dollars) for reimbursement of the NDEP’s enforcement investigation costs pursuant to issues addressed in the Agreement.”
