For the week of Sept 25 - Oct 1, 2002

INEEL cleanup 
gathers momentum

Citizens Advisory Board 
gives basic approval

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By GREG MOORE
Express Staff Writer

An accelerated U.S. Department of Energy timetable for cleaning up buried nuclear waste at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory met with basic approval from the site’s Citizens Advisory Board during a meeting in Sun Valley last week.

The plan may finally be putting into motion a decades-old effort to remove or stabilize chemical and radioactive contaminants--byproducts from the nation’s Cold War weapons production programs--stored at the federal research facility east of Arco.

Kathleen Hain, INEEL team leader for environmental restoration, told the 15-member board at the Sun Valley Inn on Wednesday that excavation on the notorious Pit 9 will begin by the end of September 2003. That would be six months ahead of the schedule set out in an agreement made in April between the DOE and the state of Idaho.

"They’re moving along very aggressively on this," said advisory board member David Kipping, a resident of Hailey. "I think there is a great emphasis on doing the project as quickly as possible."

The initial work will be a demonstration project on a 20-by-20-foot section of the one-acre pit. Retrieval of plutonium-contaminated waste will provide detailed information on what’s there and how to best go about cleaning up the entire Radioactive Waste Management Complex, a 97-acre spread of 20 pits and 58 narrower trenches.

Hain said Pit 9 was chosen for the demonstration work solely because of its ease of access. A previous cleanup effort was begun there in 1995, but abandoned three years later after a subcontractor of Lockheed Martin, which was managing INEEL at the time, became bogged down in technical and financial problems.

Bechtel BWXT Idaho took over responsibility for the Pit 9 project in 1999 when it became the management and operating contractor for the INEEL.

The waste complex contains drums of mostly transuranic waste--that is, radioactive materials contaminated with manmade elements heavier than uranium--dumped there during the 1950s and 1960s. Most was generated by nuclear weapons production at the Rocky Flats DOE site west of Denver. The wastes are leaking hazardous chemicals, and perhaps radioactive material, into the Snake River Plain Aquifer.

During the 1950s and most of the 1960s, DOE placed barrels in rows in the pits, and kept records of what was in each. In 1969, however, the barrels were dumped randomly, then crushed and covered with dirt.

"Those drums are not quite intact," Hain said. "That’s where we started to have problems with retrieval."

Hain told the board that the operation will be the first time buried transuranic waste has been retrieved anywhere. She said the results will disclose the accuracy of shipping records and whether the techniques used are effective with the type of waste and soils at the site.

"The very first thing that will come out of this demonstration is that you can safely retrieve transuranic waste," she said.

The DOE began construction of the structure used to enclose the operation on July 30, four months ahead of schedule.

Hain said a mockup of the containment structure will be done by mid December, at which time workers can begin training to excavate the drums and handle the materials inside them.

The workers will operate a backhoe from outside the structure, which will use negative air pressure to contain airborne contaminants stirred up during excavation. The waste will be placed on carts that will transport it within the containment structure to gloveboxes, where workers will separate the materials. Excavation is planned to take less than three months, and be done by December of next year.

Once separated, the materials will be repackaged in barrels and stored above ground pending treatment by the Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project, expected to be on line by next March. The facility will put the waste into a form suitable for shipment to and permanent disposal at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.

The demonstration project at Pit 9 will give the DOE information to draft a plan on dealing with the remaining buried waste. Under its agreement with the state, such a plan must be completed by 2007. Hain said public comments will be officially sought before a plan is finalized.

In 1995, the DOE and the state of Idaho signed an agreement requiring all transuranic waste at INEEL to be placed in permanent disposal by 2018. However, a dispute over whether the agreement requires all the buried waste to be removed, or whether some of it can be treated "in situ" and left in place, is before the U.S. District Court in Boise. The DOE estimates that removal would cost about 10 times that of "in situ" treatment, which involves surrounding the waste with an impermeable material such as grout or melted glass. Either way is expensive--the agency estimates retrieval costs to run about $1 billion per acre, and in-situ treatment to be about $700 million per acre.

Transuranic waste received at INEEL since 1970 has been placed in temporary storage above ground, rather than buried. Some of that waste, already in a condition for disposal, is now being shipped to WIPP. Under the 1995 agreement, 3,100 cubic meters, out of the 65,000 cubic meters of waste stored above ground, must be shipped out of the state by Dec. 31. The DOE has said it expects to meet that deadline.

 

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