Fluor Idaho officials say they expect to finish retrieving transuranic waste at the Department of Energy’s Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project in Idaho before the end of the month.
Fluor Idaho President Fred Hughes last week said the Idaho National Laboratory site cleanup contractor would finish removing the final 28 boxes, or 89 cubic meters, of transuranic waste “in the next three or four weeks.” The process of extracting about 65,000 cubic meters of legacy waste drums and boxes began in 2003. The last of the drums were pulled out of the pile in November, according to Hughes.
Once retrieval is complete, the roughly 25 to 30 workers on the project will be reassigned to AMWTP’s waste treatment efforts, Fluor spokesman Erik Simpson said. As of June, 10,300 cubic meters of waste remained to be processed; a more recent figure was not available.
Some retrieval workers were concerned they might lose their jobs, Hughes said, but that won’t be the case.
The waste was shipped to Idaho from the Rocky Flats Plant near Denver in the 1970s and 1980s. It was stacked on a concrete pad and covered over with a dirt berm. DOE later constructed a building over the pile to protect it from the elements, and in the early 2000s AMWTP was built to treat and repackage the waste.
Energy Department officials have for months examined possible future uses for the facility after Fluor finishes retrieving and treating the remaining waste. A likely mission will be accepting and treating transuranic waste from other DOE sites. The state of Idaho allows transuranic waste in for treatment as long as it leaves within a year.
The federal agency will release a decision on the facility’s future after the scheduled completion of current operations in 2018 — from 2019 and beyond — later this year, said Jack Zimmerman, DOE’s Idaho Cleanup Project deputy manager.
DOE considered AMWTP’s future when it sunk about $10 million worth of upgrades into the facility last year. The improvements include robotic arms that pry open waste containers and sort the contents, as well as conveyor belts and elevators that remotely move waste drums and boxes around the plant.
DOE can’t yet ship any of the waste out of Idaho due to the slow reopening of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, which resumed operations in December after years of recovery from two February 2014 accidents. The delay is likely to cause the department to miss a 2018 milestone in its 1995 settlement agreement with the state. The milestone requires DOE to ship all 65,000 cubic meters out of Idaho before the end of the year.
