The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management plans to relocate some transuranic waste from the Nevada National Security Site to the Idaho National Laboratory where it will be prepared for eventual shipment to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.
The transuranic material is what “we refer to as the Nevada spheres,” Robert Boehlecke, an environmental management program manager for DOE, told the Nevada Site-Specific Advisory Board last week. At this time the DOE lacks the needed equipment at the affected area of the Nevada National Security Site, Boehlecke said, to prepare the waste for shipment to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), where defense-related transuranic waste is disposed of in an underground salt mine.
“The plan is to ship those items to Idaho where they can be processed, segmented and properly packaged,” Boehlecke said. Due to some work taking place at the Idaho National Laboratory, however, the timeline has been pushed back to January, he added.
The site-specific advisory committee meeting was held virtually.
During the same meeting, John Daniels, a public affairs manager with the Nevada field office for the semi autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration, said the security site has, following DOE’s lead, dropped its mandatory mask requirement for vaccinated individuals, but is still observing social distancing safeguards for certain activities like meetings.
Note: The article was modified May 27 to correct information in the second and third paragraphs.
