The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board plans to hold a public hearing by May to discuss an April 2018 accident at the Energy Department’s Idaho National Laboratory in which four drums of radioactive sludge blew off their lids.
Three of the four DNFSB members voted on Dec. 12 to hold a hearing in Washington, D.C., with acting Chairman Bruce Hamilton abstaining.
The accident is worthy of further investigation, Hamilton wrote in his published comments. “Whether that hearing is best accomplished in Washington, DC instead of in Idaho is questionable. I therefore defer to the preferences of my fellow Board Members. I therefore abstain.”
The DNFSB is a safety watchdog for DOE nuclear operations at Idaho and other sites around the country. While the agency has no enforcement power over the Energy Department, it can make safety recommendations to the energy secretary, who must then publicly agree or disagree with the board’s remedy.
There is no firm date set yet for the hearing, DNFSB General Manager Glenn Sklar said by telephone Friday.
Fluor Idaho has essentially finished recovery operations following the April 11 incident during sludge packaging in Room 106 of Waste Management Facility-1617 at INL’s Radioactive Waste Management Complex.
In an October analysis, the company concluded waste inside the 55-gallon drums overheated to about 150 degrees Celsius after depleted uranium contacted air for the first time in years. The waste originally came from the former Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant near Denver, and had been buried on-site at INL for decades.
Fluor Idaho is preparing a plan for restarting waste operations at the fabric filter building where the incident occurred.
The contractor has already received feedback from DOE officials in Idaho regarding its corrective action plan to address causes of the drum breach and ensure it does not happen again. Once Fluor Idaho resolves issues flagged by the federal agency, the company will submit the plan to the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality.
The plan won’t be public until it is provided to the state DEQ. Idaho can seek changes if it determines the plan does not comply with the state permit which governs hazardous waste at the Idaho National Laboratory, said DEQ Permitting Manager Brian English in a Thursday email.
In its monthly status report to the state, Fluor Idaho said Dec. 20 some residual work remains from the cleanup.
“Waste material from cleanup activities and some untreated drums remain in the facility, as well as a number of trays in the retrieval area that have not been processed through the drum packaging stations,” the company said. Plans for recovery and restart will be provided to the DEQ in coming months.
“The cleanup materials are currently in permitted container storage areas,” said DEQ Hazardous Waste Unit Manager Natalie Creed in an email. Once the material is characterized, some final treatment could be needed. A disposal path will have to be determined for any material that cannot be sent to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, she added.
The company expects to submit a draft safety evaluation on restart to DOE this month. No date has been set for actual resumption of work.
As of December, Fluor Idaho said it had spent $7 million in connection to the April drum breach. The figure includes “all costs for the work done during the emergency response, on the facility cleanup and recovery efforts and the investigation,” said company spokesman Erik Simpson in an email. The costs going forward will be associated with restart of the facility and resumption of waste repackaging, he added.
Fluor Idaho holds the $1.5 billion Idaho Cleanup Project contract, which runs through May 2021. One of its chief tasks includes treating and shipping transuranic waste to WIPP.
