The topic of cleanup at the Idaho National Laboratory is good for long-term burnout. While an intensive cleanup project has long been underway to the west at Hanford, a great deal of the core cleanup work remains to be done in eastern Idaho.
What’s mostly under discussion is the buried waste around the large INL grounds, much of it low-level but some of it quite hazardous. Some Superfund activity has been going on, too, but the whole process – which is becoming a little aged by now, having been launched with a high-profile state-federal agreement in 1995 – still is awaiting some general policy: What do we clean up, what do we just leave as is, and what do we do with it all?
On October 22, federal agencies (the Department of Energy, Environmental Protection Agency) and the state proposed options “for addressing buried waste at the DOE-Idaho Site’s Radioactive Waste Management Complex Subsurface Disposal Area. The Radioactive Waste Management Complex was established in 1952 for the buried disposal of site-generated radioactive and hazardous wastes. From 1954 through 1970, the landfill received wastes from the Rocky Flats Plant in Colorado and other off-site generators.” The options ranged from no action (1) to full waste removal (5). But evidently, the weight of planning seems to be moving toward picking up just some of it. And maybe not all that much.
Here’s a longish quote from an op-ed published this week from Peter Rickards of Twin Falls, an activist for at least a couple of decades on nuclear waste, and his take of where this seems to be headed.
Do you remember the nuclear waste deal in 1995? The Lockheed nuclear businessmen teamed with the Republican politicians and ex-Gov. Cecil Andrus in the “Get the Waste Out” campaign. Colorful ads promised this nuclear deal would “say no to leaving waste over the aquifer.” They promised if we import tons of foreign spent nuclear fuel, this deal would “guarantee that the federal government must come up with the money to clean up existing Idaho National Engineering Laboratory waste for disposal outside our state.”
Well, the final buried plutonium “clean-up” plan is out for official public comment now, quietly released during the holiday season. Without a whisper from the politicians or state nuclear oversight team, the “preferred alternative” No. 4 does not come even close to removing 10 percent of the buried plutonium, which is leaking over our water supply in a flood zone.
Why is the state not demanding alternative No. 5, which removes “all” the buried plutonium? Why did the state say, “they were supporting the partial retrieval and awaiting to see the public comment”?
The final plan concludes a full clean-up is too expensive! Have you ever seen an Idaho politician refuse $8 billion in nuclear jobs? Why are the politicians refusing to demand a full clean up? There is more than one ton of dumped plutonium particles, with billions of cancer causing particles in each pound.
Do you remember the infamous Pit 9? In 1993, that was chosen as the worst plutonium pit, and the plan was to remove it all, and then get the rest. Then Lockheed’s subsidiary company that won the contract, refused to lift a shovel full. Lockheed’s subsidiary sued Lockheed to collect the money anyway. Now, this final plan cherry-picks just a very small portion of Pit 9!
The state has bragged that it won the Clinton-esque court case over the definition of “all” the buried plutonium. Removing all the plutonium waste is what we were promised in 1970. To be clear: 1) the 1995 ads promised all buried plutonium would be removed. That would be 58,000 cubic meters. 2) The court ordered that since “the state agreed to change the definition of transuranic waste” during the deal negotiations, that only 30,000 cubic meters of the buried plutonium must be removed. So, really, “all means half” according to our trusty politicians and state officials! But now, this final plan does not even come close to removing even that half, or the 30,000 cubic meters, of court-ordered buried plutonium. Not even close!
The formal comment period is about to close. But as word of some of this starts to circulate, the pressure to do something more could pick up anyway.
[NOTE Corrected to state that the comment period ends tomorrow; thanks to an altert reader for pointing out the correct date.]
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