If any of the factors that led to the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee shipping mislabeled radioactive waste to Nevada are present elsewhere in the Department of Energy complex, the agency’s Office of Enterprise Assessments did not find them in a year of looking, according to a recent report.
The complex-wide evaluation“did not find any conditions similar to those that led to the non-compliant waste shipment from Y-12 in July 2019,” reads the office’s final report. The Energy Department published the report online this month, but the document is dated July 2020.
About a year ago, then-Deputy Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette ordered the office to produce the report after the agency acknowledged that Y-12 had for six years shipped improperly labeled radioactive waste to a disposal facility at the Nevada National Security Site.
Y-12 is the defense-uranium processing hub where the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) makes the uranium-powered secondary stages of nuclear weapons. Y-12 discovered and self-reported the inappropriate shipments in July 2019. Around that time, DOE said the Tennessee operation sent nine shipments, with a total of 32 containers of radioactive waste, labeling the weapon-related material as low-level waste when it should have been labeled as mixed low-level waste.
Y-12 paused waste shipments to Nevada after admitting its mistakes last year, and those shipments are still on hold, pending “an independent assessment of the corrective actions that have been implemented in the last year.” The spokesperson provided no timeline, but said “shipments will resume once the independent assessment is completed and [the Nevada National Security Site] signs off on Y-12’s waste certification program.”
In April, in a separate report that focused only on Y-12, the Enterprise Assessments office said the site’s improper shipments included a “prohibited item” in a classified waste delivery. The report said shipments went out the door with the wrong label because nobody at Y-12 wrote strict rules for disposal of weapon-related material, and that some people working in the facility’s waste management program felt “uneasiness” about the site’s management of that material.
Last year, in acknowledging the rule-breaking shipment, a DOE spokesperson characterized a prohibited item sent to Nevada, calling it an assembly with “two small energetics (just over two tenths of a gram) each connected to separate pressurized vessels, inside a one-half inch steel container. If the pressurized vessels were to release their pressure the pressure inside the assembly would be no greater than 60 pounds of pressure per square inch (psi), about the same amount of pressure as a bicycle tire.”
In its August final report on complex-wide waste packing and shipping, the Enterprise Assessments office recommended, among other things, that DOE program offices set up a working group to prepare lessons learned from the Y-12 incident, with the aim of ensuring sufficient federal oversight of contractors to prevent a repeat.
