A key piece of technology at the Department of Energy’s Idaho site has in 100,000 hours of operation compacted over 238,000 containers of transuranic waste.
The “supercompactor” at the Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project compresses the 55-gallon drums into pucks just 5 to 7 inches thick, according to an Aug. 2 press release from site cleanup contractor Fluor Idaho. That has reduced by about 6,000 the number of truck transports that otherwise would have shipped close to 43,000 cubic meters of transuranic waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.
“It’s truly a unique asset in the DOE complex,” Jack Zimmerman, DOE Idaho Operations Office deputy director, said in the release. “Compacting the drums allows us to get a greater return on investment for each waste shipment sent from Idaho to WIPP. The supercompactor has paid for itself many times over considering the valuable space it has saved at WIPP and the number of truck shipments it has saved the taxpayer.”
The Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project was built to treat and repackage roughly 65,000 cubic meters of transuranic waste deposited at the Idaho site in the 1970s and 1980s. Waste retrieval wrapped up in early 2017, and as of March 8,500 cubic meters of waste still was awaiting processing. An updated figure was not immediately available Monday.
The Department of Energy has also been considering what to do with the facility once its present mission is completed. One option is to use it to treat waste from other DOE sites around the country.
