As of mid-August, Idaho had assessed almost $11 million in civil penalties against the Department of Energy for the federal government’s failure to begin cleanup of sodium-bearing byproducts of nuclear fuel reprocessing at Idaho National Laboratory.
The bill was partially offset by about $1.64 million in penalty reductions to account for 273 days when DOE could not work on the cleanup due to COVID-19, Natalie Walker, the state agency’s hazardous waste bureau chief, wrote in an email to Weapons Complex Monitor.
As of Aug. 12, DOE had made nearly $1.49 million in cash penalty payments to the state, Walker said. The federal agency also has performed more than $3 million worth of what the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality refers to as supplemental environmental projects, said Walker.
This leaves DOE with more than $6 million worth of penalties to either pay or work off, and Idaho continues to assess penalties at the rate of $6,000 per day. With penalties continuing to pile up daily, DOE has said it may request further pandemic leniency.
Since March of 2017, Idaho has assessed DOE $6,000 in daily fines for failure to use the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit (IWTU) to solidify some 900,000 gallons of sodium-bearing, liquid radioactive waste. The state began issuing the fines at $3,600 per day in 2015 as allowed by a 1995 legal agreement with the federal government. The sodium-bearing waste was left over from reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel at Idaho from the U.S. Navy and a variety of domestic nuclear sites
Recently, Idaho conditionally agreed to give DOE a 15-month extension, until Sept. 30, 2022, to fill up the first canister at IWTU. If not for COVID-19, DOE and contractor Fluor Idaho have said they would have met the previous deadline to start up the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit by June 30.
CH2M-WG Idaho, then the prime contractor for Idaho cleanup, essentially finished building the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit in 2012, but the system never worked as designed.
In January, a joint venture led by Jacobs, which acquired CH2M in 2017, will become the new cleanup contractor at Idaho National Laboratory, making it the third team to assume responsibility for IWTU.
Separately this week, Joel Case, DOE’s assistant manager for the Idaho Nuclear Technology and Engineering Center, told members of the DOE chartered Idaho National Laboratory citizens advisory board that the agency was six months ahead of schedule transferring spent nuclear fuel to dry storage from wet.
The project had a Dec. 31, 2023 deadline. The transfer process is tackling 220 different types and 32,820 pieces of fuel. About 61 percent of the fuel has reached dry storage, Case said.
John Stang contributed to this story from Seattle.
