Layoffs are expected within a couple months at Fluor Idaho’s Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project (AMWTP), Idaho Falls Mayor Rebecca Casper said last week.
The facility workforce at the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory “is on its way out the door,” Casper said. This is expected “before the New Year, before the holidays,” she added during a Sept. 13 presentation at the National Cleanup Workshop in Alexandria, Va.
The INL complex, near Idaho Falls, employs nearly 4,000 workers. It is the No. 5 employer in the state.
After the presentation, Casper declined to say exactly how she knew about upcoming layoffs or how many workers might lose their jobs, although the future of the AMWTP has been a subject of much speculation for a couple years as the end of its mission approaches this year or in early 2019.
The facility was established to meet court-mandated waste disposal deadlines in a 1995 legal settlement between the state of Idaho, DOE, and the Navy. The deal required roughly 65,000 cubic meters of transuranic and low-level waste stored at INL to be retrieved, packaged, and shipped to the Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico by Dec. 31, 2018.
Since 2003, the Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project has been treating the waste, most of which came to INL from the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant in Colorado.
Assistant Secretary of Energy for Environmental Management Anne Marie White said Sept. 4 an Energy Department report on future uses for AMWTP is “almost complete.”
The ongoing DOE study is said to consider allowing treatment of more out-of-state waste at AMWTP. Such a move might require revision to the legal settlement that says out-of-state waste cannot stay in Idaho longer than 12 months.
“Here we are, the clock is ticking,” Casper said. “Does it make sense to mothball a billion-dollar facility” with a skilled workforce, she asked. Once the current workforce starts receiving layoff notices, it could be hard to stop employees from fleeing to other opportunities elsewhere, she said.
The mayor believes about 700 workers are employed at the facility, a figure supported by Dana Kirkham, chief executive of Regional Economic Development for Eastern Idaho.
The layoffs are expected to occur in phases, Casper said, adding she was heartened by a recent conversation with White, which indicated the long-anticipated report should be out by the end of the year.
“A decision must be made,” Casper said.
Kirkham agrees a decision must be made, but said 2018 layoffs are probably a “worst-case scenario.” The economic development official agrees with the mayor that DOE should have addressed the future of AMWTP well before now. “Much of the workforce is homegrown” and wants to stay in Idaho, she said.
Fluor Idaho and the Energy Department did not respond by deadline to requests for details on any layoff notices, the size of the current workforce, or plans to wind down AMWTP operations.
