Energy Department contractor Fluor Idaho has found the fourth drum lid from an April 11 accident where four drums of radioactive sludge overheated and ejected their lids inside a building at DOE’s Idaho National Laboratory.
The lid was found by an airlock entry door near the floor within Room 106 of the WMF-1617 airlock at the Accelerated Retrieval Project 5 space. The contractor said in a regular monthly report, dated Sept. 27 to the state of Idaho Department of Environmental Quality, it had retrieved the fourth drum lid.
Fluor Idaho also reiterated it hopes to finalize its investigation and issue a cause analysis this month, followed by completion of cleanup and decontamination of the accident site in November.
The Idaho Cleanup Project contractor has yet to announce the cause of the incident where four 55-gallon drums of radioactive sludge overheated and ejected their lids, causing waste to spill onto the walls and floor of the room. Samples from the spilled sludge has been tested for flammable gases and other traits that might have contributed to the incident.
Fluor Idaho said last month it had been excavating a tranche of Cold War waste at a subsurface area of INL.
Fluor Idaho had voluntarily suspended digging up waste, from the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant in Colorado, which has been buried at Idaho for decades. The April incident occurred at a ARP 5 site where exhumed waste drums are opened, treated to remove banned items, and repackaged. The four breached drums had not yet been certified for transport to DOE’S Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.
