Fluor Idaho continues to prepare a plan for restarting waste operations at a fabric filter building at the Energy Department’s Idaho National Laboratory where four drums of radioactive sludge overheated and ejected their lids in April 2018.
The contractor has already received feedback from DOE officials in Idaho regarding its corrective action plan to address causes of the drum breach and ensure it does not happen again. Once Fluor Idaho resolves issues flagged by the federal agency, the company will submit the plan to the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality.
In its monthly status report to the state, Fluor Idaho said Dec. 20 it has largely completed recovery operations following the April 11 incident during sludge packaging at Room 106 of Waste Management Facility-1617 at the Radioactive Waste Management Complex at INL.
“However, waste material from cleanup activities and some untreated drums remain in the facility, as well as a number of trays in the retrieval area that have not been processed through the drum packaging stations,” the company said. “The plans for recovery and restart will be communicated to the DEQ in future monthly status reports and conference calls.”
The company said it expects to submit a draft safety evaluation on restart to DOE this month. No date has been set for actual resumption of work.
Containers of sludge waste, from the former Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant near Denver, were being reopened and the material repackaged after having been buried at INL for decades. Waste inside the four 55-gallon drums overheated to about 150 degrees C after depleted uranium contacted air for the first time in decades.
As of December, Fluor Idaho said it had spent $7 million in connection to the April drum breach.
Fluor Idaho holds the $1.5 billion Idaho Cleanup Project contract, which runs through May 2021. One of its chief tasks includes treating and shipping transuranic waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.
