The Energy Department has extinguished wildfires that were burning at the Nevada National Security Site, the Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration wrote in a social media post Tuesday.
“NNSS firefighters successfully extinguished a lightning-generated fire which began on Aug. 24,” reads a post on the Nevada National Security Site’s Facebook page. “The NNSS fire chief declared the fire ‘cold’ mid-morning Sept. 4, 2017.”
The blaze burned cheat grass and sage grass in an estimated 5,000-acre area in the west-central corner of the former nuclear-weapon test site but did not affect any structures, facilities, or radiologically contaminated spots, DOE said.
The 1,360-square-mile Nevada National Security Site is overseen by the National Nuclear Security Administration. Its missions include supporting stockpile stewardship of the U.S. nuclear deterrent via sub-critical plutonium tests; production of systems for detecting nuclear weapons and radiological “dirty bombs;” and disposal of low-level and mixed-low-level radioactive material.
