Former Idaho Gov. Philip Batt opposes potential Energy Department shipment of transuranic waste from the Hanford Site in Washington state to the Idaho National Laboratory.
Batt, a Republican, was governor from 1995 to 1999, and championed a landmark settlement between the state, DOE, and the U.S. Navy that limited nuclear waste storage in Idaho. He discussed his position in a Friday column in the Idaho Statesman newspaper.
“My agreement called for cleaning up everything possible at the site and shipping all transuranic waste — the long-lived nuclear waste — to a secure facility in New Mexico,” Batt wrote, referring to DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
“After cleaning up everything being stored above our Snake River Aquifer, it is ironic that our U.S. government now wants to send Hanford, Wash., transuranic waste to Idaho in order to prepare it for shipment to New Mexico,” Batt said. “Come on, Hanford. Prepare your own transuranic waste and send it to New Mexico. We did ours.”
The Idaho-based Snake River Alliance has launched a campaign to stymie any proposal to ship 7,000 cubic meters of TRU waste from Hanford to INL’s Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project (AMWTP) for repackaging prior to ultimate disposal at WIPP.
The Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management and the Idaho Cleanup Project Citizens Advisory Board have discussed potential shipments, although no formal application has been filed, according to both the state and DOE.
The 1995 agreement says any radioactive waste brought into Idaho must be shipped out within a year. The agreement also set an end-of-2018 deadline for INL’s pre-existing inventory of 65,000 cubic meters of radioactive waste to be repackaged and shipped out of Idaho. Most of the inventory had been moved out prior to February 2014, when WIPP suspended waste disposal for about three years after an underground radiological release. The WIPP outage has been cited as a reason the 2018 deadline might not be met.
