Fluor Idaho still does not have a date for when sludge repackaging is expected to resume inside the building at Energy Department’s Idaho National Laboratory where four drums of the radioactive waste overheated and blew off their lids on April 11.
That is a key takeaway from a monthly report the lab’s cleanup contractor filed Oct. 30 with the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality. The monthly update, which covers progress made in the recovery from the incident from Sept. 19 through Oct. 22, also said the company expects to complete a “corrective action plan” in November.
The accident happened inside the Accelerated Retrieval Project 5 building, within the lab’s Radioactive Waste Management Complex. ARP 5 is a fabric building where workers remove aerosol cans and other forbidden objects from drums of sludge waste buried for years at INL after being shipped from the former Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant in Colorado. The drums are ultimately certified for disposal at DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, although none of the four 55-gallon drums had been approved for the trip south.
The fix-it plan will be based on Fluor’s formal cause analysis published Oct. 25. The 350-page evaluation found the breaches happened after depleted uranium inside the drums contacted air for the first time in about 40 years, and that the company should have taken greater care in processing and repackaging sludge waste.
The report also faulted Fluor Idaho for not doing more to identify potential combustion sources inside the drums. While there were no injuries, that was partly because the incident occurred after 10 p.m. when there were no employees nearby.
