Fluor Idaho said Friday it hopes to have a plan in place by the end of this week for the probe and initial site recovery for the April 11 breach of four drums of radioactive waste at the Energy Department’s Idaho Site.
A plan for “investigation, sampling, and recovery” should be complete by May 4, the contractor said in a report to Natalie Creed, Hazardous Waste Unit manager for the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality.
The event took place at Room 106 of a building at the Accelerated Retrieval Project 5 (ARP 5) facility.
Contractor crews have re-entered the room three times since April 11, according to the report to Creed. The first re-entry came on April 19, with two more on April 25.
The initial crew on April 19 saw four drums with missing lids, as well a “solid, powdery waste and debris on the floor and on adjacent closed containers,” according to the report.
ARP 5 is located within the Radioactive Waste Management Complex at the Idaho National Laboratory. The Sludge Repackage Project at ARP 5 is licensed for container storage and various treatment and processing. The breached sludge drums had not yet been certified for shipment to DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico.
At about 10:30 p.m. local time on April 11, a fire crew responded to an alarm at the site. The team found one drum with its lid off. There were no flames evident but the 55-gallon drum was smoking. The fire crew used a fire extinguisher to extinguish the smoldering. Three other drums were subsequently confirmed to have ejected their lids.
The sludge waste had years ago been shipped to Idaho from the retired Rocky Flats nuclear weapons facility in Colorado. It had initially been stored in a subsurface disposal area at the Radioactive Waste Management Complex.
