U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) cleanup crews are ahead of schedule on a project to protect Idaho's Snake River Plain Aquifer after removing the final amount of buried waste at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) Site.
An extended-arm excavator was used to remove the hazardous waste from the Radioactive Waste Management Complex's Accelerated Retrieval Project (ARP) IX facility, representing a project milestone 18 months ahead of schedule, a Dec. 29, 2021 DOE press release said.
“The buried waste was the primary concern of our stakeholders since the beginning of the cleanup program,” Connie Flohr, manager of the Idaho Cleanup Project for the DOE Office of Environmental Management (EM), said in the release. “Completing exhumation early will allow us to get an earlier start on construction of the final cover.”
The waste will be repackaged over the coming weeks and shipped out of state to a permanent repository, the release said.
Officially launched in 2005, the ARP project seeks to remove radioactive and hazardous wastes which were deposited in the Subsurface Disposal Area (SDA) for shallow burial from 1952 to 1970, the release said. So far, crews have removed more than 10,300 cubic meters of waste from the SDA, far surpassing the minimum requirement of 7,485 cubic meters.
“I want to thank everyone associated with waste retrieval portion of this project,” Fred Hughes, program manager with EM INL Site cleanup contractor Fluor Idaho, said in the release. “I’m so proud of the crews that took this on as personal goals to get this very important task completed this year.”
