nuclear-news

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — Companies in charge of nuclear waste at two facilities in the US state of New Mexico have been cited for safety violations in connection with a 2014 underground fire and an escape of radiation into the atmosphere, the US Department of Energy said in a press release on Friday.The companies are Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP), which operates an Energy Department facility to store nuclear waste and Los Alamos National Security (LANS), the contractor that manages the nearby Los Alamos National Laboratory, according to the release.

“The violations by NWP… are associated with two events that occurred in February 2014. The first event involved a fire in a salt haul truck in the [waste storage facility] underground, and the second event involved a radiological release,” the release explained.

The violations by LANS are associated with the packaging of nuclear waste containers, according to the release.

The two events took place in February 2014 at the Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, an underground storage facility at a 600 meter deep salt bed, the release explained. Both companies have already been heavily penalized, losing 90 percent of their fees.

In the second event ten days later, air monitors detected unusually high levels of radiation, later traced to an exploding barrel of nuclear waste from Los Alamos.

The storage facility has been closed for the past two years, but the Energy Department expects to reopen the plant later this year with improved safety measures, according to an earlier posting on the department’s website.

Los Alamos is best known as the site where the United States developed the atomic bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War II.  http://sputniknews.com/us/20160219/1035057063/us-nuclear-waste-contactors.html#ixzz40eL2SilO