Idaho continues to assess $6,000 in daily penalties against the Department of Energy for failure to treat 900,000 gallons of sodium-bearing liquid radioactive waste at the Idaho National Laboratory, and the total is approaching $7.8 million, a state official said last week.
The penalties will continue until the lab’s the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit (IWTU) converts 900,000 gallons of sodium-bearing liquid radioactive and hazardous waste into a stable form for disposal, Idaho officials say.
Decades of defense-related work at INL left behind both the sodium waste and 1.2 million gallons of highly radioactive granular calcine waste. Both types of waste will be treated at the IWTU, the Government Accountability Office, reported in September.
During an industry event last week, Energy Department officials including Senior Adviser for Environmental Management William (Ike) White said the IWTU would start operating by year’s end. Once the facility is up and running it could take a decade or more to treat the full inventory of waste. Between 2012 and now the estimated cost of the facility has grown from $571 million to $1 billion, GAO said.
The facility was initially supposed to start up in 2012, but did not operate as designed. Various modifications by INL cleanup contractor Fluor Idaho, followed by about 100 days of test runs, are solving the plant’s technical problems, DOE officials said. Idaho is assessing the penalties for DOE noncompliance with a 1995 legal agreement on nuclear fuel storage in the state.
The total penalties amount to $7.75 million as of March 11, Natalie Creed, Hazardous Waste Bureau chief at the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality, said in a Wednesday email. The state started assessing the fines at $3,600 per day in 2015, a rate later raised to $6,000/day on March 31, 2017.
In May of each year, the Energy Department submits a proposal to Idaho outlining how it plans to settle the prior year’s penalties, as tabulated at the end of March.
So far, the Energy Department has agreed to satisfy $5.68 million of the assessed amount with more than $1.48 million in cash payments and the rest through performance of supplemental environmental projects.
Four supplemental environmental projects, valued at more than $300,000, which Idaho approved in May 2015, have all been completed, Creed said.
