The Nevada National Security Site disposed of roughly 550,000 cubic feet of radioactive waste from other federal sites around the country during 2021, according to the Department of Energy.
The total includes classified and low-level or mixed low-level radioactive waste, the DOE Office of Environmental Management said in its Strategic Vision for the former Nevada Test Site between now and 2032.
Radioactive Waste Management Disposal Operations at the Nevada National Security Site can receive and dispose up about 1.2 million cubic feet per year according to material presented last month to the Nevada Site Specific Advisory Board for DOE.
Waste shipments to the disposal site at Nevada went down sharply during the pandemic, dropping to about half of the typical 1 million cubic feet annually, Robert Boehlecke, program manager for Environmental Management at the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS) told the panel last November, adding things are starting to rebound.
The Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., regained its waste shipping certification to the Nevada National Security Site in May 2021. Y-12 lost its shipping rights in 2019 after public disclosure that it sent 32 containers of incorrectly labeled waste containers to NNSS over several years.
Short-term Environmental Management goals at the Nevada site include regulatory approval of the groundwater corrective action plan for Pahute Mesa by the end of 2023, according to the Strategic Vision. The Nevada National Security Site was used for nuclear weapons tests between 1951 and 1992.
