The Department of Energy acknowledged Wednesday that for six years it sent nuclear weapons waste to the Nevada National Security Site in violation of its waste acceptance criteria.
The agency confirmed the information the same day Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak (D) made it public in a press release. Senior DOE officials including Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, head of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), briefed Sisolak and members of Nevada’s congressional delegation in Las Vegas on Tuesday, according to the governor’s press release.
From 2013 through December 2018, DOE sent nine shipments containing a total of 32 containers to the Nevada National Security Site from the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., according to a July 10 statement from a DOE spokesperson. Y-12 is the NNSA’s uranium processing hub.
The shipments are currently frozen. The Energy Department did not say exactly what kind of waste it had improperly shipped to Nevada. The Nevada National Security Site is allowed to receive both low-level and mixed-low-level waste for permanent disposal.
It is still not clear exactly how the shipments violated the Nevada site’s waste acceptance criteria. The shipments were managed at Y-12 by a contractor and were “potentially mischaracterized as low-level waste rather than mixed low-level waste,” according to DOE’s statement.
Sisolak said he first found out about the shipments on July 3, in a call from Deputy Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette. The DOE deputy chief initially told Sisolak that the shipments were low-level waste incorrectly labeled as mixed low-level waste. However, DOE had not confirmed Brouillette’s description of the error, Sisolak wrote in his press release.
The state’s congressional delegation, already aggravated by a 2018 shipment of plutonium to the Nevada National Security Site, responded forcefully to the latest news. That included a call from Rep. Steven Horsford (D) for Energy Secretary Rick Perry to resign.
Perry had not resigned at deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor.
However, Brouillette has ordered the agency’s Office of Enterprise Assessments to embark on a lengthy review of past and present DOE waste-packaging-and-shipping programs, according to a July 9 memo to Nathan Martin, director of Enterprise Assessments.
Brouillette’s memo, which the DOE spokesperson provided this week, did not set a timetable for the office to complete the review. The memo also did not specify whether DOE would ever publish the office’s eventual “recommendations on any reforms needed to ensure greater accountability across the DOE complex.”
