The Idaho Cleanup Project Citizens Advisory Board is preparing to issue a recommendation on the future of the Idaho National Laboratory’s Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project (AMWTP), sources said this week.
The Energy Department advisory board will hear public input on potential future uses for the AMWTP during a conference call on March 28.
The AMWTP since 2003 has provided treatment, packaging, and shipping services for transuranic and mixed low-level waste at Idaho. It is expected to finish processing the site’s current stockpile of legacy waste in mid-2019, according to slides presented by Idaho Cleanup Project Assistant Manager Jim Malmo at the board’s last meeting on Feb. 21.
Roughly 9,000 cubic meters of the original 65,000 cubic meters of TRU legacy waste remains. It was shipped to INL in the 1970s, primarily from the Rocky Flats site in Colorado.
The Energy Department could extend the AMWTP mission by treating off-site waste from the Hanford Site in Washington state, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and several other facilities not identified in the Malmo slides. Presumably this would save the other sites from developing their own waste treatment facilities.
The Idaho Department of Environmental Quality has not taken any position on the future mission of AMWTP, said Natalie Creed, the state agency’s hazardous waste unit manager. A 1995 legal settlement between DOE and Idaho requires INL to ship the last of the legacy transuranic waste out of state by the end of 2018. It’s a tough deadline given the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, the end point for that material, was closed to shipments from February 2014 to April 2017 following a radiation release.
The 1995 agreement would allow the Idaho National Laboratory to propose to bring in more off-site waste for treatment, so long as it leaves within a year, Creed noted. This would entail six months for treatment and six months for shipping it out-of-state, the DEQ official said.
“If INL and TRU waste generator sites determine that treating off-site waste at AMWTP is beneficial, discussion with the State, regulators and stakeholders would be necessary,” according to the Malmo presentation.
Among the financial issues needing to be resolved is whether generator sites or INL would pay for waste characterization and payloading for shipments to AMWTP, Malmo said in the presentation, which is posted on the advisory’s board’s website.
