The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management plans to relocate some transuranic waste from the Nevada National Security Site to the Idaho National Laboratory where it will be prepared for eventual shipment to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.
The transuranic material is what “we refer to as the Nevada spheres,” Robert Boehlecke, an environmental management program manager for DOE, told the Nevada Site-Specific Advisory Board last week. Boehlecke said that DOE does not have the equipment at the Nevada site to prepare the waste for shipment to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), where the agency disposes of defense-related transuranic waste in a deep-underground salt mine.
The two, three-foot-diameter metal Nevada Spheres contain transuranic (TRU) waste generated from historical national security experiments run by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, a DOE spokesperson said by email Friday. The spheres are stored in protective containers within the Area 5 Radioactive Waste Management Complex at the Nevada site.
Nevada is the former site of atmospheric and underground nuclear explosive tests.
“The plan is to ship those items to Idaho where they can be processed, segmented and properly packaged,” Boehlecke said. Due to some work taking place at the Idaho National Laboratory, however, the timeline has been pushed back to January, he added.
The spheres will be treated at a facility currently used for sludge processing, which should be completed in December, the DOE spokesperson said.
While Navarro has the environmental management contract for the Nevada National Security Site, a $350-million, 10-year deal that started in October 2020, the spheres work is overseen by the management and operations contractor at the Nevada National Security Site, the Honeywell-led Mission Support and Test Services.
The site-specific advisory committee meeting was held virtually.
During the same meeting, John Daniels, a public affairs manager with the Nevada field office for the semi autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration, said the security site has, following DOE’s lead, dropped its mandatory mask requirement for vaccinated individuals, but is still observing social distancing safeguards for certain activities like meetings.
