An economic development executive in eastern Idaho said Wednesday that a number of questions remain about the Energy Department’s decision to close the Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project (AMWTP) at the Idaho National Laboratory.
Dana Kirkham, CEO of the Regional Economic Development for Eastern Idaho, will attend a meeting with DOE officials in a few days to discuss next steps on retraining and other possible job opportunities for the 700-member AMWTP workforce.
The Energy Department announced Dec. 5 it would close the Fluor Idaho-managed facility in mid-to-late 2019 after it completes treating and shipping about 65,000 cubic meters of transuranic waste from the Idaho National Laboratory. The treated sludge waste goes to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico.
The agency said there was no compelling long-term business case for keeping the plant open to process transuranic waste from other states. The Energy Department completed its study on future use of AMWTP in August, and the document was made public this month on the web page for the Citizens Advisory Panel for the Idaho Cleanup Project.
“There are some questions that need to be asked and answered with regard to methodology used for the study. Did they factor in the cost of a new facility somewhere else,” Kirkham said by email. She also questioned whether DOE fully analyzed if other sites, called upon to treat their own TRU waste prior to shipment to WIPP, could match the safety record at the Idaho facility.
Kirkham said Fluor Idaho has not yet sent out layoff notices to AMWTP employees, although it did notify them of the planned closure, Kirkham said. There has been informal talk of working with Idaho’s congressional delegation to win some sort reprieve for AMWTP, although nothing has crystalized yet.
“AMWTP’s mission in Idaho is nearly complete, thanks to the talented professionals who have worked for years to safely process waste in our state,” Idaho’s two Republican senators, Mike Crapo and Jim Risch, said in a joint statement. “These men and women have the experience and capability to handle any future projects required of them, and we will continue encouraging DOE to make use of our state’s talent and resources.”
The Energy Department identified 6,100 cubic meters of TRU waste at the Hanford Site in Washington state and certain “small quantify sites” that could be shipped to Idaho. However, there were too many potential headaches, particularly “packaging and transportation challenges,” to make an expanded project economical, according to the 44-page DOE document,
The small sites noted in the study are the Nevada National Security Site, the Separations Research Process Unit located in New York state, and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
For starters, it would take one or two years for DOE to develop “packaging solutions” for much of the affected waste at Hanford, the agency said. Until then, AMWTP would need to be kept in a “warm standby” at a cost of $3.5 million per month. The facility could be kept in “cold standby” with a skeleton staff performing “bare minimum” upkeep on the equipment for only $3 million annually, but any restart would then likely cost $100 million.
About 2,500 cubic meters of waste at Hanford could be shipped without any modification to the packaging. “It would be more cost-effective to establish an on-site certification capability at Hanford and ship directly to WIPP compared to shipping this waste to AMWTP for super-compaction and certification,” the DOE analysis says.
The DOE study also notes that AMWTP can treat only contact-handled waste and not remote-handled waste, which is more radioactive and needs to be handled with more care. Also, the facility needs to treat at least 1,225 cubic meters of TRU waste annually to operate efficiently, according to the study. There are questions whether such a rate could be maintained several years in the future.
The Energy Department said in the study it is uncertain that Idaho would waive its six months-in, six-months-out rule for out-of-state radioactive waste to allow continued operation of AMWTP.
After the sludge waste, stored for decades at INL, has been checked for ignitable material, it is treated and compacted at AMWTP before being shipped to WIPP. The material originally came from sites such as the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant in Colorado.
The AMWTP, which opened in 2003, will have sent 7,300 shipments of transuranic waste out of state by the time it closes in 2019. The facility was created under a 1995 legal settlement on nuclear waste storage at INL between the state of Idaho, DOE, and the U.S. Navy.
