The Idaho Cleanup Project Citizens Advisory Board recently voted 7-4 to urge the Energy Department to extend the lifespan of the Idaho National Laboratory’s Advanced Waste Treatment Project (AMWTP) by allowing the facility to process radioactive waste from out of state.
The letter, posted June 27 on the panel’s website, urges DOE to continue to run the waste processing center built to help end storage of out-of-state waste at the national lab.
The panel’s letter says several issues should be addressed before the AMWTP can take waste from elsewhere in the DOE complex. Among those issues: how much and what types of waste could be shipped to the lab and how the Energy Department would meet its mandate under a 1995 settlement agreement with Idaho to ship imported waste back out of state within 12 months.
In addition, priority must be given to the facility’s mission to package and ship Idaho’s own transuranic waste to DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico, according to the advisory panel.
The AMWTP was established under the agreement to process 65,000 cubic meters of radioactive waste. That mission is scheduled to conclude by the end of this year, although Idaho has said DOE might not meet the deadline. Most waste already going through AMWTP was shipped into the state decades ago from Energy Department sites such as Rocky Flats in Colorado.
The Energy Department has said it might make business sense to keep AMWTP open to process waste from other locations, rather than building similar facilities at those DOE sites. The state has an interest in keeping the AMWTP workforce of several hundred people employed. The parties have already discussed the possibility of shipping 7,000 cubic meters of TRU waste from the Hanford Site in neighboring Washington state to AMWTP for repackaging.
The dissenting members of the citizens panel in the same letter noted the backlog of waste still at AMWTP. They added the majority said did not stress protection of the Eastern Snake Plain Aquifer.
