The Department of Energy and contractor Fluor Idaho said in a Tuesday press release the final shipment of radioactive waste has been placed into the 97-acre Subsurface Disposal Area at the Idaho National Laboratory.
The disposal area, which began accepting waste in the 1950s and has since accepted laboratory-generated waste and shipments from the Rocky Flats plutonium pit production plant and other sites, is scheduled to be capped and permanently closed in 2028, according to strategic goals outlined earlier this year by the agency’s Office of Environmental Management.
The Subsurface Disposal Area stopped taking hazardous and transuranic waste in 1970 but continued to take boxed low-level radioactive waste and later highly-radioactive metal scraps, according to the DOE press release.
In 1994, DOE started to place waste into 100 newly-built concrete vaults at the Subsurface Disposal Area. In 2008 the agency started waste disposal using the second set of 100 concrete vaults. In early May, the last waste shipment went into the vaults.
Eventually, after the Subsurface Disposal Area is closed, DOE will dispose of activated metal at a facility near the Advanced Test Reactor Site managed by Idaho National Laboratory’s prime contractor, Battelle Energy Alliance.
