A shipment of radioactive waste from a nuclear cleanup site in Scotland was sent over the weekend to the U.S. Energy Department’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina, on its way to Tennessee, the Scottish Sunday Post newspaper reported.
The radioactive waste was loaded onto a U.S. Air Force cargo plane and took off from Scotland on Saturday, the paper said, noting that the highly enriched uranium will then be headed to a Tennessee facility by ground transport.
DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), however, said by email it could not comment on specific removal operations for security reasons.
Dounreay spokesman Colin Punler said by email this week that roughly 100 tons of nuclear material have accumulated at the Dounreay fast-reactor site in Scotland from research and development programs; now that the facility is being decommissioned, materials that can be reused are being returned to national stocks, presumably from foreign providers.
This program, Punler said, began in 2001 and is expected to be completed in “several more years.” He added that information about routes, locations, and dates of shipments are protected under nuclear material transport security regulations.
Maxcine Maxted, Savannah River Site spent nuclear fuel program manager with the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management, said Tuesday at a meeting of the SRS Citizens Advisory Board’s Nuclear Materials Committee that she was not aware of a shipment from Dounreay and that it is not an EM activity.
“It did not come to the Savannah River Site. You’ll have to talk to NNSA,” she said.
The U.K. is cleaning up the Dounreay facility, site of former fast-reactor research. Radioactive waste management is part of the closure. U.K. Nuclear Decommissioning Authority documents last year showed the Euratom Supply Agency has approximately 1 ton of unirradiated HEU, most of which is stored at Dounreay.
The NNSA and the Euratom Supply Agency announced at the 2016 Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, D.C., a deal to swap nuclear material between the United States and Euratom member states, based on a memorandum of understanding signed in 2014 between the two entities for HEU exchanges.
As part of that agreement, the United Kingdom said it would ship to the United States roughly 700 kilograms of excess highly enriched uranium from Dounreay in exchange for a different kind of HEU that the U.S. would send to the European Atomic Energy Community in France for production of medical isotopes. These isotopes would then be used to diagnose and treat cancer in Europe.
Tom Clements, director of watchdog organization SRS Watch, said he believes the latest shipment of material was likely transported to the NNSA’s Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee. Still, he said he had anticipated spent fuel from Dounreay to Savannah River at a later time, and could not confirm that this particular shipment took place.
The Savannah River Site has regularly received shipments of foreign nuclear material for processing and disposal. In April, the site began receiving liquid HEU from Canada for processing at its H Canyon facility, converting the material into low-enriched uranium to be sent to the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) for use in nuclear power reactors.
Redacted documents outlining SRS nuclear materials management plans from the last two years showed the site will receive plutonium, uranium, and other nuclear materials for the next 15-plus years. Those documents said H Canyon would from fiscal years 2018 to 2024 process 40 metric tons of HEU, which would also be converted and sent to the Tennessee Valley Authority.
The documents also noted ongoing concerns over the lack of a disposition path for material already stored at SRS, including 13 metric tons of plutonium.
