The operator of a closed radioactive waste dump that caught fire in southern Nevada last weekend was troubled over the years by leaky shipments and oversight so lax that employees took contaminated tools and building materials home, according to state and federal records.

A soundless 40-second video turned over by the firm, US Ecology, to state officials showed bursts of white smoke and dirt flying from several explosions on 18 October from the dump in the brown desert, about 110 miles north-west of Las Vegas.

In the 1970s, the company had its license suspended for mishandling shipments – about the same time state officials say the material that exploded and burned last weekend was accepted and buried.

Nevada now has ownership and oversight of the property, which opened in 1962 near Beatty as the nation’s first federally licensed low-level radioactive waste dump. It closed in 1992. State officials said this week they did not immediately know what blew up.

A state fire inspector, Martin Azevedo, surveyed the site on Wednesday.



His report, obtained on Friday by the Associated Press, described moisture in the pit and “heavily corroded” 55-gallon drums in and around the 20ft-by-30ft crater. Debris from the blast spread 190ft. Two drums were found outside the fence line.

Jon Bakkedahl, state radiation control supervisor, said previously the material that exploded was probably buried in the mid-1970s.

Federal records say 4.7 million cubic feet of materials was buried before the 40-acre waste site closed. Officials say there are 22 trenches up to 100ft deep and 800ft long, with pits capped by up to 10ft of clay and dirt.

The permit was for low-level solid radioactive waste, including contaminated tools, protective clothing, machine parts, medical items and laboratory supplies.

US Ecology, formerly known as Nuclear Engineering, said this week the Nevada radiological waste facility operated “under a different name and different ownership”, and referred questions about the fire to state officials. Nuclear Engineering changed its name to US Ecology in 1981.

Today, the company has 15 hazardous materials treatment, storage and disposal facilities around the country – including a 40-acre hazardous materials dump accepting toxic polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, adjacent to the closed Beatty radioactive disposal site.

“We offer a service that is required for businesses to comply with complex state and federal regulatory requirements that were established to ensure waste is managed safely and properly,” company spokesman Dave Crumrine said in email replies to questions.

The Nevada state emergency management chief, Caleb Cage, said operating records for the damaged trench, No14, were in Department of Health and Human Services archives and were not immediately available.

The scramble to find the paperwork illustrates problems posed by lax regulation and oversight in the years before and immediately after the federal Environmental Protection Agency was established in 1972. The Beatty dump is not an EPA superfund clean-up site.

“Regulations and waste management practices have evolved since the 1960s and 70s,” a US Ecology statement said.

In 1979, the then Nevada governor Robert List ordered the Beatty low-level waste facility shut down and launched an investigation after a radioactive cargo fire on a truck parked on US Highway 95, at the facility gate.

The fire came three years after employees were dismissed for stealing radioactive building materials, tools and even a portable cement mixer, according to a 1994 report prepared by the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory.

Operations at Beatty resumed “only after assurance was given by the federal government that the rules governing shipments … would be enforced,” according to the Idaho lab report.

List expressed doubt that anyone will ever know what is really underground at the site.

“Good luck with that,” he said. “What we found when we did our investigation was they had very, very skimpy records about what was there.”

Former US senator Richard Bryan, a Democrat who was governor from 1983 to 1989, remembers “an ongoing series of problems” at the Beatty site, including several episodes involving leaking trucks.

The radioactive dump covers half an 80-acre property turned over to the state in 1997 and now administered by Health and Human Services. It is an island amid federal land. Nevada leases a surrounding 400-acre buffer from the federal Bureau of Land Management.

In 2010, US Ecology was fined nearly $500,000 by the US EPA at its hazardous industrial waste recycling and disposal plant after inspectors found leaky containers and operating logs showing smoke emissions containing hazardous wastes had been improperly vented in 2008. Inspectors also found poor record-keeping.

“US Ecology fully cooperated with the EPA, remediated all areas of concern, and the matter was closed,” Crumrine said. “We are confident there was no impact to human health or the environment.”

Crumrine said the facility was fined one other time since 2005, paying $6,200 after the state found an open container.

Bryan recalled hearings about what was being sent to the site when he was state attorney general and List was governor.

“At no time was there any statement made by the company or by any federal official that what was buried at Beatty had a potential to catch fire,” Bryan remembered.