A mixture of state and local emergency responders plus “commercial inspectors” and “other authorities” this week cleared a truck fire involving radioactive waste off of a highway in Tennessee, the Nashville Fire Department said.
A vehicle the fire department identified as a “semi-truck” caught fire in the westbound lanes of Interstate 40, about 10 miles west by road of downtown Nashville near the 204A exit, according to a statement posted at 3:52 p.m. Eastern time on Monday to the website X.
“The product was identified as low grade radioactive waste and was isolated to its packaging,” the Fire Department wrote in a later post to X.
The fire department did not identify the shipper of the materials, the owner of the waste or the intended destination of the truck. The department did upload a photo of what appeared to be a damaged container resting on a flatbed trailer.
The shipment did not belong to either the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management at the Oak Ridge Site in Oak Ridge, Tenn., or the DOE National Nuclear Security Administration’s neighboring Y-12 National Security Complex, according to spokespersons.
“That was not one of our shipments,” the DOE spokesperson wrote in an email on Tuesday morning.
“[N]o Y-12 waste was part of that shipment,” the spokesperson for the Y-12 site prime wrote in an email on Tuesday afternoon.
The DOE spokesperson deferred requests for comment to Perma-Fix Environmental Services, Atlanta. A Perma-Fix spokesperson did not reply to a request for comment this week.
During a roughly 2.5-hour response, the department closed a roughly 2.5-mile stretch of highway, in both directions, “on I40 between Exit 201 and 204.” Both the eastbound and westbound lanes of I-40 had reopened as of about 6:30 p.m. on Monday, according to the Nashville Fire Department.
By the time the interstate reopened, firefighters had “all gone through the decontamination process” and “no readings were found indicating any levels of any hazards present.” The department turned the scene over to the Tennessee Department of Transportation, the Nashville District of the Tennessee Highway Patrol and the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency, the fire department wrote on X.
