Officials and employees on Thursday celebrated retrieving all 65,000 cubic meters of transuranic waste that was buried under a dirt berm at the Department of Energy’s Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project in Idaho.
Idaho Gov. C.L. “Butch” Otter and Attorney General Lawrence Wasden attended the event, which honored AMWTP personnel whose job for the past 14 years has been to carefully extract the radioactive materials from the pile. When retrieval began in 2003, the berm covering the stack of waste drums and boxes stood 35 feet high, filling a massive building that covered 7 acres.
The final box was retrieved the night of Feb. 21. After removing it, a group of Fluor Idaho employees draped a banner over the box and signed it, Fluor Idaho President Fred Hughes said.AMWTP retrieval employees have been reassigned to the facility’s waste treatment efforts, which involves characterizing, sorting, compacting, and repackaging the material for shipment to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.
“There was never a doubt that we could do it. The only question was nobody knew how the hell we were going to do it. And you all figured that out,” Otter told employees and dignitaries Thursday. “You set a standard for the United States — for the world.”
The waste came to Idaho from the Rocky Flats Plant near Denver in the 1970s and 1980s. The waste was stacked on a concrete pad and covered over with dirt. Later, the 7-acre building known as the Transuranic Storage Area-Retrieval Enclosure was constructed over the top of the pile to protect it from the elements. AMWTP was built in the early 2000s to treat the waste.
Removing the drums and boxes was straightforward at first, but as years went by the containers became significantly more degraded and time consuming to safely extract, Hughes said. “In some cases you couldn’t tell where one box ended and another started,” he said.
Officials said Fluor completed retrieval three months ahead of its DOE contract requirement. Over 8,500 cubic meters of the retrieved transuranic waste remains to be treated and packaged for shipment at AMWTP.
