The state of Idaho has now assessed the Energy Department $4.77 million in penalties for its failure to start treating sodium-bearing waste at the Idaho National Laboratory.
Fluor Idaho has estimated it could be well into 2019 before it begins operation of DOE’s Integrated Waste Treatment Unit (IWTU), Natalie Creed, hazardous waste unit manager at the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), said by email.
In June, the state agency signed off on DOE’s latest set of proposed supplemental environmental projects, which will allow the federal agency to retire the $2.19 million worth of daily fines assessed between April 1, 2017, and March 30, 2018.
The Energy Department agrees to do environmental projects, recommended by the state, in exchange for proportional retirement of the debt. Most of the projects agreed to earlier this year will be finished in 2019. The biggest effort, the Southeast Idaho Data Collection and Monitoring Project, should be complete in October 2021. It includes drilling wells and monitoring the Eastern Snake Plain Aquifer and Big Lost River drainage area.
The Idaho DEQ has since 2015 fined the Energy Department each day for failure to begin treatment of 900,000 gallons of Cold War-era sodium-bearing waste produced by spent fuel reprocessing at INL. The penalties – which began at $3,600 per day and then increased to $6,000 daily in March 2017 – are issued under a series of modifications to a noncompliance consent order, which grew out of a 1995 settlement on nuclear waste storage at the lab between Idaho, the Energy Department, and the U.S. Navy.
The penalties are assessed seven days per week and almost $1.3 million has run up from March 31 through Oct. 31.
The Energy Department and its contractors, first CH2M-WG Idaho and more recently Fluor Idaho, had previously agreed to perform $1.3 million worth of environmental projects to help retire earlier financial penalties. The total dollar amount of SEPs approved so far is about $3.15 million.
Although the waste treatment facility was largely complete in 2012, it has never worked as planned to carry out its mission of converting the waste into a solid form for storage on-site pending final disposal off-site. The federal agency has said its recent 30-day test with 53,000 gallons of simulant went well at IWTU.
The unit is undergoing maintenance, which will be followed by an additional 50-day run, Kevin O’Neill, DOE federal operations manager at Idaho, told the citizens advisory panel for the Idaho Cleanup Project on Oct. 25.
The 50-day test will be followed by further plant modifications, equipment maintenance, and performance tests, with oversight by the state and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, according to O’Neill.
In a separate presentation to the panel, DOE’s deputy manager for the Idaho Cleanup Project, Jack Zimmerman, said all transuranic waste at INL won’t be shipped out by Dec. 31 of this year.
The Energy Department is required, under the terms of the 1995 settlement agreement, to ship all 65,000 cubic meters of the TRU waste by year’s end. As of October, however, more than 7,500 cubic meters of TRU waste remained.
The missed deadline does not come as a surprise. Idaho and DOE officials have said the work at INL’s Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project (AMWTP) was slowed by the nearly three-year waste emplacement outage, beginning in February 2014, at the DOE Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. The TRU waste from Idaho will be shipped to the New Mexico site for final disposal.
Zimmerman also said the lab is sending between four and six shipments of TRU waste to WIPP during an average week. In addition, about four shipments of mixed and low-level waste are sent to other repositories weekly. Zimmerman’s slides did not identify the other waste repositories.
In addition, Idaho officials are still awaiting DOE’s upcoming report on potential future use of the AMWTP. The facility was built to process and ship TRU waste from the INL stockpile covered by the settlement. Many Idaho officials favor keeping it in business to process and treat radioactive waste from Energy Department facilities in other states.
The report is expected to be released by the end of the year.
