A Department of Energy official acknowledged on Feb. 21 that the Idaho National Laboratory missed its Dec. 31, 2018, deadline to move defense-related transuranic waste to the federal disposal facility in New Mexico.
Under a 1995 settlement between DOE, Idaho, and the U.S. Navy over in-state nuclear waste storage, the Energy Department was supposed to ship 65,000 cubic meters of stored TRU waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant by the end of 2018.
That deadline was not met because of “WIPP unavailability” for about three years following a February 2014 underground radiological release, Idaho Cleanup Project Deputy Manager Jack Zimmerman noted in a slide for a presentation to the Idaho Cleanup Citizens Advisory Board.
Still, the Energy Department is close enough to completing the project to wind down operation of the Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project (AMWTP) later this year. The AMWTP, which opened in 2003, is used to retrieve, treat, and ship above-ground transuranic waste from INL to WIPP.
About 7,600 cubic meters remains on-site in Idaho, a DOE spokesperson said in a Thursday email. The remaining on-site material requiring treatment is a combination of debris and non-debris waste generated by Cold War nuclear weapons operations. Remaining debris waste requiring treatment is planned to be sorted, segregated, and super-compacted at AMWTP.
Treatment of the debris waste is scheduled to be completed by the end of the year. Treatment and repackaging of non-debris waste, which contains sludges, soils, and liquids, is expected to stretch into 2020, the spokesperson said. Packaging and shipment of TRU waste will continue until the Idaho settlement agreement milestone is met.
The work is being done as part of Fluor Idaho’s $1.6 billion Idaho Cleanup Project contract, which runs through May 2021.
The Idaho National Laboratory accounted for 243 of the 311 shipments received at WIPP during 2018. The lab typically moves six to eight shipments of contact-handled transuranic waste to New Mexico every week, according to Zimmerman’s presentation. The TRU waste in question is held in retrievable configurations at on-site storage areas and was originally sent to INL from the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant in Colorado, the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, the Mound site in Ohio, and smaller DOE generators.
In addition to transuranic waste, Idaho continues to make four shipments weekly of low-level and mixed-low-level radioactive waste to other disposal sites, according to Zimmerman.
