The Y-12 National Security Complex at the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee could soon be approved to resume waste shipments to the Nevada National Security Site, Nevada’s federal site manager said Thursday at an online conference.
The Y-12 certification was lifted following a 2019 disclosure that dozens of mislabeled containers of waste were sent to Nevada between 2013 and 2018.
“I sent the letter out earlier this week,” Robert Boehlecke, DOE’s Nevada program manager for the Office of Environmental Management, said during a contractor’s group roundtable discussion during the Waste Management Symposia conference, hosted virtually this year due to the pandemic.
“Of course, they had to undergo the process for restart,” and pass muster with a group of federal staffers from Nevada who visited Y-12 in November, Boehlecke told members of the Energy Facility Contractors Group.
In addition, Nevada, DOE and the Environmental Protection Agency are in the advanced stages of hammering out a legal settlement over the mislabeled waste, Boehlecke said. He didn’t say when the settlement might be finalized.
“We are implementing a lot of lessons learned” at the Nevada National Security Site, following disclosure of shipments of mislabeled radioactive waste sent last decade to the Nevada site from Y-12, Boehlecke said.
Nine shipments, totaling 32 containers of mislabeled waste were sent from Y-12 to the Nevada National Security Site before then-Deputy Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette informed Nevada officials, on July 3 of 2019, that the shipments may have contained something other than the allowed low-level waste.
The revelation prompted a DOE-wide investigation of waste handling, certification and transportation throughout the cleanup complex, along with public criticism from the governor of Nevada and the state’s Congressional delegation.
Eventually, the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Y-12 management and operations contractor, Consolidated Nuclear Security, publicly characterized the contents of the problem containers as non-compliant weapons-related material.
DOE’s eventual report on the mislabeled shipments, published in 2020, concluded the issues at Y-12 were not common at other facilities in the weapons complex.
But “[w]hen one issue happens at a specific site, it impacts the entire complex,” said Mark Senderling, who is EM’s deputy assistant secretary for waste and materials management, following Boehlecke’s update.
Senderling urged DOE and contractor staff to strive to be always vigilant in ensuring proper regulatory compliance.
