The volume of low-level radioactive waste shipped to the Nevada National Security Site from Department of Energy cleanup sites is picking up again after dipping to half of its normal level of more than 1 million cubic feet per year during the pandemic, an agency official at the site told the Nevada Site Specific Advisory Board Wednesday.
During the month of November, DOE expects to receive about 70,000 cubic feet of low-level waste at the site, Robert Boehlecke, a program manager for the DOE Office of Environmental Management, told the hybrid advisory board meeting, which some members attended remotely.
“The volumes for fiscal year 2020 were down at 500,000 cubic feet,” Boehlecke said. “Typically, we are around a million cubic feet,” he said. “So, we are starting to see the shipments come back up a little bit.”
During his presentation, which lasted less than 10 minutes, Boehlecke did not cite any figures for the just-completed fiscal 2021 period. However, the DOE cleanup office said in January it expected to receive about 706,000 cubic feet in fiscal 2021, compared to more recent totals of about 1.2 million cubic feet in past years, according to the minutes of a previous advisory board meeting.
Along with workplace restrictions made by the federal government to curb the spread of COVID-19 during since early 2020, DOE tightened its vetting of shipments across the weapons complex after the 2019 disclosure that 10 shipments of mislabeled weapons-related materials were sent to the site’s to Area 5 Radioactive Waste Management Complex from the Y-12 National Security Complex between 2013 and 2018.
Following a legal settlement with Nevada, DOE and its semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration resumed shipments from Y-12 in May.
During his Wednesday presentation, Boehlecke said the Nevada Site’s Radioactive Waste Acceptance Program did three facility reviews in October, with a small number of people actually traveling to generator sites, while others inspected documents. Three more such evaluations are planned for November, he said.
The Radioactive Waste Acceptance Program at the Nevada Site is run by environmental contractor, Navarro Research and Engineering.
