It could take several more weeks to complete cleanup of an Idaho National Laboratory facility where four drums of solidified radioactive waste were found to have breached on April 11, the president of site cleanup contractor Fluor Idaho wrote in a Friday column for local newspapers.
The investigation has entered a forensic phase, and waste samples from the drums at the Accelerated Retrieval Project 5 facility have been sent to outside laboratories for analysis, according to Fluor Idaho President Fred Hughes. “We expect to learn specifics about the waste and why it reacted after being processed and placed in clean drums.”
Workers have to date cleaned up one of six grids of the facility’s Airlock 5, where the drum breach occurred, Idaho Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) Hazardous Waste Unit Manager Natalie Creed said by email Friday. The contractor will soon file its first monthly report on the drum breach with the DEQ.
Since the incident, Fluor has set up a video surveillance system, added monitoring devices, and checked the ventilation system, including replacing the filters to help ensure nothing is released from the building, DEQ Hazardous Waste Permitting Manager Brian English said by email.
The drums that breached their lids contained wastes generated during the 1960s. The waste was shipped to Idaho decades ago from locations including the former Rocky Flats nuclear weapons site in Colorado. At the Idaho National Laboratory, the material had been stored for years in a subsurface area.
The waste had been processed and placed inside new drums, and had sat inside the ARP 5 area for several hours before the event, Hughes said.
Although INL briefly suspended off-site shipments of transuranic waste to the Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, the shipments resumed within a few days.
The company official credited the APR’s “negative air pressure” for trapping the contaminants inside the building and its filters for helping prevent a radiological release.
