Cleanup crews begin to close largest building at INL site
IDAHO FALLS, Idaho (KIFI/KIDK)-Crews at the Radioactive Waste Management Complex have begun to close the Transuranic Storage Area Retrieval Enclosure.
The building, which is the largest on the Idaho National Laboratory site, once housed 65,000 cubic meters of Cold War weapons waste. The building is large enough to house an aircraft carrier or about four football fields.
It was built over an asphalt-lined waste storage area that accepted tens of thousands of drums and boxes of transuranic and hazardous waste. Most of it came from the former Rocky Flats plant near Denver between 1970 and the late 1980’s.
After the waste was stacked several rows deep it was covered with clean soil. The enclosure was completed in 1996.
Now, Fluor Idaho workers have dismantled the building’s inner enclosures. They are now clearing equipment under federal and state regulations before the asphalt pads are taken out and disposed of. If acceptable, that material will be moved to the Idaho CERCLA (Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act) Disposal Facility.
The enclosure is part of the larger Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project facility and its removal and closure is the first part of its phased closure.
That will make way for a drainage system that will channel water away from a 150-acre soil cover that will be constructed over the disposal area. That site accepted waste for shallow burial between 1952 and 1970.
Construction of the cover, or cap, will begin after workers at the Accelerated Retrieval Project IX complete targeted waste exhumation of the last of 5.69 acres of transuranic and hazardous waste. EM and Fluor Idaho expect to complete removal of the last 0.34 acres of waste in 2021.
