The total civil penalties imposed by the state of Idaho against the Department of Energy for failing to treat sodium-bearing waste at the Idaho National Laboratory now exceeds $10 million, a state official said this week.
As of March 31, the assessed penalty will hit $10,062,000, Natalie Creed, hazardous waste bureau chief for the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality, said Tuesday in response to an email inquiry from Weapons Complex Monitor.
“However, we are currently anticipating a formal request from DOE soon for some penalty relief for a portion of the last year due to delays associated with COVID-19, so that number is expected to change in the near future,” Creed added.
Since March of 2017, Idaho has assessed DOE $6,000 in daily fines for failure to treat 900,000 gallons of sodium-bearing liquid radioactive waste at the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit. The state began issuing the fines at $3,600 per day in 2015 for not complying with a 1995 legal agreement on nuclear fuel storage in Idaho.
The DOE Office of Environmental Management is retiring a large chunk of the debt, about $7.86 million so far, by either performing or paying for supplemental environmental projects within Idaho. These include projects linked to water quality, wetland restoration, planting native vegetation, reducing stream channel erosion and developing land around a municipal water tank into a park with a nature walk, according to Creed.
The DOE and its Idaho cleanup contractor, Fluor Idaho, plan to start operation of the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit sometime this fall, probably October, an executive with the contractor said during an online conference earlier this month. Fluor has a roughly five-year contract currently valued at $2.2 billion that started in June 2016 and is scheduled to run through September. At the time of the award, it was initially valued at $1.4 billion.
The first-of-its-kind Waste Treatment Unit was built by former contractor CH2M-WG Idaho in 2012 to turn 900,000 gallons of sodium-bearing waste into a more stable form for disposal. The waste treatment project has so far not worked as designed, and Fluor Idaho has re-engineered much of the facility.
Since 2012, the cost estimate for the project has grown from $570 million to more than $1 billion, the Government Accountability Office wrote in a 2019 report. The sodium-bearing waste was left over from reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel at the Idaho National Laboratory from the U.S. Navy and a variety of domestic nuclear sites, according to the state.
