Fluor Idaho’s five-year, $1.4-billion contract to clean up the Energy Department’s Idaho site officially began Wednesday, with the now-former incumbents turning over the keys to the weapons complex’s largest backlog of transuranic waste.
DOE announced in February Fluor won the ICP Core contract, which combines cleanup work previously handled by CH2M-WG Idaho, a partnership between CH2M and AECOM, and Idaho Treatment Group, which includes B&W, AECOM, and EnergySolutions. The former managed most cleanup work at the site, while the latter handled the oft-challenging Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project — a sort of shipping and handling facility for the contaminated equipment and material known as transuranic waste.
“We look forward to helping DOE meet its cleanup mission at the Idaho site, building on the momentum that the incumbent employees have already created, and serving the communities where our employees live,” Fred Hughes, president and program manager for Fluor Idaho said in a Wednesday press release.
Many of those employees — some 1,700, according to Fluor Idaho’s press release — were formerly with DOE’s previous cleanup contractors on site, the Idaho Treatment Group and CH2M‐WG Idaho.
Idaho houses more transuranic waste than any other site managed by DOE’s Environmental Management office. The waste has been piling up there since 2014, when an accidental underground radiation release and unrelated underground fire shut down the only U.S. disposal site for such material, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.
