IDAHO FALLS, Idaho (AP) - Work to clear radioactive waste from the Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project is nearly complete.
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, there are only 28 nuclear waste boxes left to retrieve at the facility’s airplane hangar-like building, The Post Register reported Tuesday (https://bit.ly/2kVhoVo). Officials expect to finish the job later this month.
As removal efforts come to a close, 25 to 30 workers focused on retrieval efforts will be reassigned to treatment duties, said Fluor Idaho President Fred Hughes. Fluor Idaho is the contractor on the project.
“My management team and I sat down with the workers and said, ’OK, when retrieval is done, this is where you’re going to support the rest of the project,’” he said. “And it was like turning on the afterburners. They’ve been really going at it.”
Jack Zimmerman, DOE’s Idaho Cleanup Project deputy director, said he’s been impressed with Fluor’s pace retrieving and treating waste since taking over the contract in June.
Though retrieval is nearly complete, there is still waste treatment work to finish at the facility. The site is unlikely to meet a deadline to have all the waste be removed from Idaho by the end of 2018.
The waste must be treated and placed in new containers for shipment to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. The New Mexico facility only recently reopened and a backlog of more than 900 shipments are stored in Idaho waiting to be removed. WIPP is only accepting five shipments per week from waste generator sites starting in the spring.
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Information from: Post Register, https://www.postregister.com
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