An Energy Department analysis made public last week finds there was not a compelling business case to continue operating the Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project (AMWTP) at the Idaho National Laboratory to process transuranic waste from other states.
The agency has officially decided to close the facility in mid-to-late 2019 after it completes treating and shipping about 65,000 cubic meters of TRU waste. The material goes to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico.
While DOE identified 6,100 cubic meters of TRU waste at the Hanford Site in Washington state and certain “small quantify sites,” there were too many potential headaches, particularly “packaging and transportation challenges,” to make an expanded project economical, according to the 44-page Aug. 28 DOE document, posted in recent days to the web page for the Citizens Advisory Panel for the Idaho Cleanup Project at INL.
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.
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,” according to the DOE analysis.
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, which employs about 700 people, was created under a 1995 legal settlement on nuclear waste storage at INL between the state of Idaho, DOE, and the U.S. Navy.
