The Air Force’s mishandling and possibly inadequate monitoring of radioactive material over several years at the Kirtland Air Force Base is still on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s radar, a Christmas-week regulatory filing shows.
Though the Air Force has dealt with half the 14 apparent violations identified in 2022 by NRC at the base near Albuquerque, the commission is still keeping an eye on the service’s plans to track the spread of soil contaminated with thorium-232: an extremely long-lived, naturally occurring alpha-emitter found at Kirtland facilities where people are trained to detect radiation.
As far back as March 2011, there was evidence that thorium-232 had spread beyond the NRC-licensed training facility boundaries “as well as visual evidence of surface runoff into an arroyo, but the extent of the radiation levels and concentrations of Th-232 in the soil outside the boundaries wasn’t evaluated, properly characterized, or acted upon,” according to an NRC inspection report dated Dec. 8 and published online Dec. 26.
A multi-agency team including the Air Force and the Army Corps of Engineers and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and contractors have been surveying areas around the training facilities and are preparing a report, the NRC said.
“The field work and full site characterization and complete report with results, conclusions and recommendations will be finalized by September 2024,” according to the commission’s Dec. 26 report.
It was the latest publicly available report, as of Tuesday, on the 14 apparent violations the NRC has traced to events as far back as 2005 and as recently as 2023.
In September 2022, the NRC proposed fining the Air Force $96,000 for the apparent violations. On the commission’s one-through-four scale of violations, where a one is the most severe, none of violations rated worse than a three.
Aside from the unplanned spread of thorium-232, the NRC also dinged the Air Force for moving thorium contaminated soil from one location to another without authorization.
The deliberate relocation of the thorium isotope, however, was “addressed and recurrence of similar issues should be prevented,” the NRC wrote in its report last week.
Of the 14 violations, NRC shielded three from public disclosure, citing security concerns at Kirtland, home of the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center and where, among other things, the service is widely reported to store nuclear weapons.
The western branch of National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) headquarters is also within the Kirtland fence, though that facility was not implicated in any of the 14 violations. Neither was the Defense Threat Reduction Agency’s Defense Nuclear Weapons School, another Kirtland tenant.
