More Layoffs At Idaho Cleanup Project

There have been more layoffs at the Idaho Cleanup Project on the Idaho National Laboratory site. It’s earlier than most workers expected.

The layoffs come after more than 200 employees lost their jobs at the end of September.

CWI operates the cleanup project. A number of ?force account? employees have been laid off. The laid off employees include tradesmen and construction workers who were erecting soft sided buildings around pits of radioactive material buried on the site in the 1950s.

“We received direction from our customer the Department of Energy to suspend some of our clean up work due to a budget scenario,” said CWI spokesman Erik Simpson.

The employees who have been let go were working at the Radioactive Waste Complex on the INL site.

Employees are a part of is called the Accelerated Retrieval Project which involves the excavation of radioactive waste.

Erik Simpson of the Idaho Cleanup Project said the budget process that’s causing the need for these layoffs is very fluid. The budget scenarios could also affect other projects at the site and not just with the construction of these soft-sided buildings.