Idaho Nuclear Waste Cleanup A Year Behind Schedule $83 Million Spent Without Any Debris Being Processed At Twin Falls Facililty

The federal government has spent about $83 million on a project to clean up buried radioactive waste at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory, but it has not yet turned a shovelful of dirt.

The contract for the cleanup of Pit 9 at INEL’s radioactive waste dump was signed in October 1994, but the project already is more than a year behind schedule. Lockheed Martin Advanced Environmental Systems, despite a nine-month test phase to win the contract, found the first-of-its-kind project more complex than expected.

Solvents and plutonium from the buried waste at the INEL have seeped into the ground and threaten the Snake River Plain Aquifer, which supplies drinking and irrigation water for the Magic Valley and much of southern Idaho. The federal government has promised Idaho since 1970 that it would dig up the buried waste.

Proposed plans call for a test in April 1998 of the equipment being built to do the job. Pit 9 is a one-acre portion of the INEL’s radioactive burial ground used from 1952 to 1970. The test would use actual waste from the pit. If it goes well, exhumation and treatment of waste in the pit could begin by August 1998.

But first the contractor and state and federal officials must agree to changes in the schedule. Delays have plagued the project. The contractor missed two design deadlines in February when project officials submitted incomplete designs, said Dean Nygard of the state Division of Environmental Quality.

Digging up buried plutonium-contaminated waste has never been done before. And the process turned out to be more complex than the contractor thought, said Claire Fitch, Pit 9 project manager for Lockheed Martin Idaho Technologies Inc., the contractor that oversees INEL operations for the Energy Department, including the Pit 9 project.

A full-scale test of Pit 9 cleanup was to have been conducted last August. But a proposed change in the technology for removing plutonium from the soil has put the test back about 14 months.

Project delays have resulted in increased costs, according to a November performance evaluation.