The Department of Energy’s $8-billion-plus nuclear cleanup branch is getting positive results from its early forays into artificial intelligence and machine learning, Jeff Avery, the No. 2 at DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, told a National Academies panel Tuesday.
New technology is playing a growing role at DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, Avery, principal deputy assistant secretary for Environmental Management told the National Academies Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board. “We have recently begun exploring the promising capabilities of applying artificial intelligence and machine learning … to ultimately reduce our environmental liability and assure safe cleanup operations,” Avery said.
The new technology has allowed Environmental Management to identify trends and patterns that otherwise would have been “hidden” amid groundwater data results, Avery said. Artificial intelligence has helped to “inform” cleanup of mercury vapors at the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee and coal ash basins at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, he said.
The Department of Energy’s new 10-year New Mexico Environment Department permit officially went into effect Nov. 3 at the only deep underground disposal site for defense-related transuranic waste in the U.S.
Renewal of the state’s hazardous waste facility permit for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant was finalized last month. In August, the state, DOE, federal contractor Salado Isolation Mining Contractors and stakeholder groups announced they had hammered out a collaborative permit agreement to avoid litigation.
Among other things, the new permit requires DOE to hold regular public updates on what’s happening at WIPP and submit an annual report outlining what steps it is taking to site a transuranic waste disposal site outside of New Mexico.
The Government Accountability Office should release a report on the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in the coming weeks, the Citizens Advisory Board for nuclear cleanup heard this week.
The report Murray referenced could be out in late November or early December, a GAO representative told Exchange Monitor Monday. Savannah River Citizens Advisory Board Chair Gregg Murray dropped the news that day at the outset of the two-day meeting that was carried on Youtube.
The report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) is expected to address H Canyon, Murray said. Murray recently spent about 90 minutes meeting with GAO on another upcoming report by the congressional watchdog, he said. H Canyon, which has been in operation since the 1950s, is currently used for nonproliferation and environmental cleanup, according to DOE.
Centrus Energy said Tuesday it made its first delivery of high-assay low-enriched uranium to the U.S. Department of Energy, fulfilling its initial obligation under a contract to make the material for a new generation of nuclear reactors.
The company made it under the wire of the first phase of its current contract, which covered a two-year base period in which it was to produce 20 kilograms of high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) for DOE’s inspection by Dec. 31. DOE awarded the contract in 2022.
If the HALEU passes muster with DOE, the agency would put Centrus on the hook to produce 900 kilograms of HALEU at its American Centrifuge Plant in Piketon, Ohio, by December 2024 in the second phase of the contract’s base period. Centrus is keeping the HALEU in a storage facility it constructed at Portsmouth until DOE comes to collect the material in government-furnished cylinders, the company said in its statement.
