DOE says more nuke waste heading to NTS

Friday, Dec. 10, 1999 | 10:25 a.m.

Low-level radioactive waste from more than 40 years of building nuclear weapons will end up at Hanford nuclear reservation in Washington state and the Nevada Test Site, U.S. Department of Energy officials announced on Thursday.

Hanford produced plutonium to boost the bang in nuclear weapons and is considered one of the most contaminated sites in the nation with liquid wastes stored in giant, aging steel vats.

The Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, was considered the DOE's outdoor laboratory where scientists exploded nuclear weapons above and below ground until those experiments ended in 1992 under a moratorium still in effect today.

The DOE's emphasis shifted from building nuclear bombs to cleaning up the messes left at more than 20 of its sites across the country.

The Test Site has received low-level radioactive waste shipments for more than 30 years, DOE spokesman Darwin Morgan said. The latest effort will distribute the DOE's radioactive wastes within specific regions, but will not increase Nevada's burden, he said.

From 1994 through 1997 the Test Site received 677,350 cubic feet of low-level nuclear waste. Over the next 20-year period, the DOE expects 684,045 cubic feet of the low-level wastes to arrive at the Test Site.

Most important, the DOE has to keep the Test Site ready to resume full-scale nuclear weapons tests by presidential order, Morgan said. That is its primary mission in Nevada.

Under DOE's guidelines, the Test Site does not accept radioactive liquids or gases, Morgan said. While the DOE is responsible for ensuring that containers are intact and the wastes are solid, Nevada has stricter environmental rules for discarded items contaminated with both radiation and toxic chemicals, called mixed wastes.

Two areas along the eastern edge of the Test Site have received low-level nuclear waste shipments from DOE sites scattered across the country for decades. Anything from contaminated clothing to pieces of radioactive equipment have been buried there.

Nevada and Clark County officials have been working through the 1990s with the DOE to avoid shipping low-level radioactive wastes through the Las Vegas Valley or across Hoover Dam, but no decision has been made on routing.