Engineers Make Progress On Nuclear Cleanup Project

The government’s experimental project for cleaning up buried radioactive waste at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory is running more than a year behind schedule, but managers are making adjustments that should get cleanup work going as quickly as possible.

“You can’t get too attached to any one particular system,” said Bob James, the chief engineer for the Pocatello-based Pit 9 project.

The more than 200 workers at the 88-acre site on the INEL installation have nearly enclosed the huge building on rails that will move robots over the pit to retrieve the waste.

The machine designed to melt the waste into an environmentally stable solid blocks is being assembled in Ukiah, Calif., where engineers will heat test it later this month. It will then be disassembled and shipped to INEL for reassembly in February.

The project ran into a major delay when tests revealed that an untried chemical leaching process engineers planned on using to remove plutonium from the soil was not practical or safe enough.

While they will still use a scaled down chemical leach system in the cleanup, engineers intend to do most of the work with a procedure that mechanically separates plutonium from the soil.

The chemical leach system is still in the plan because it could eventually have potential for future cleanup in the dump area that was used for disposing of waste prior to 1970.

James believes the ultimate point is to put together whatever technology best cleans up the dump as safely as possible.

The initial cleanup project, which was set up prior to the 1995 nuclear waste deal Gov. Phil Batt cut with the federal government, is scheduled for completion in 1999.