Fluor Idaho expects to finish its work this month at the site of a radioactive waste sludge accident in April 2018 at the Idaho National Laboratory, the company informed state officials last week.
Four 55-gallon drums of waste overheated and blew off their lids on April 11, 2018, hours after the contents were exposed to air during repackaging at INL’s Accelerated Retrieval Project 5 facility. The sludge waste, initially from the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant in Colorado, was stored for decades at Idaho prior to repackaging. Fluor Idaho started sludge waste repackaging a few weeks ago.
More than half of the remaining waste within Room 106 of the facility has been successfully repackaged using the added controls, Fluor Idaho said in Friday report to the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality. The Idaho DEQ approved resumption of the work April 25.
Once repackaging is done, the ARP 5 facility will be permanently closed to further waste treatment, Fluor has said. Fluor Idaho informed the Idaho DEQ it intends to resume sludge drum treatment late this summer in ARP 7, which is also a permitted Resource Conservation and Recovery Act facility with proper air filtration.
A Defense Nuclear Facilities Site Board hearing on the 2018 accident, initially scheduled for May 22, has been postponed to a later date. Fluor Idaho has the five-year, $1.5 billion Idaho Cleanup Project contract, which runs through May 2021.
