Buried nuclear waste cleanup in Idaho done

ARCO, Idaho — Work to dig up and remove radioactive and hazardous waste buried for decades in unlined pits at a nuclear facility that sits atop a giant aquifer in eastern Idaho has been completed, federal officials said.

The U.S. Department of Energy on Wednesday held a celebration to mark the completion of removing specifically-targeted buried waste from a 97-acre landfill at its 890-square-mile site that includes the Idaho National Laboratory.

Specifically, officials targeted just under 6 acres called the Radioactive Waste Management Complex. Officials said the work was completed 18 months ahead of schedule.

“What you’ve done here, the fact that we made a commitment — the state, the federal government, our partners, our contractors — to get things done and we got it done,” said Republican Idaho Gov. Brad Little, who took part in the event. “And that’s why we’re where we are today. That’s why it brings great confidence in what takes place out here at the lab.”

The targeted radioactive waste included plutonium-contaminated filters, graphite molds, sludges containing solvents and oxidized uranium generated during nuclear weapons production work at the Rocky Flats Plant in Colorado during the Cold War.

The waste from Rocky Flats was packaged in storage drums and boxes before being sent from 1954 to 1970 to the high-desert, sagebrush steppe of eastern Idaho where it was buried in unlined pits and trenches. The area is about 50 miles west of Idaho Falls.

The landfill sits above the Lake Erie-sized Eastern Snake River Plain Aquifer that supplies farms and cities in the region. A 2020

U.S. Geological Survey report said radioactive and chemical contamination in the aquifer had decreased or remained constant in recent years. It attributed the decreases to radioactive decay, changes in waste-disposal methods, cleanup efforts and dilution from water coming into the aquifer.

The report said contamination levels at all but a handful of nearly 180 wells are below acceptable standards for drinking water as set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Most of the waste is being sent to the U.S. government’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico for permanent disposal. Some waste will be sent to other off-site repositories that could be commercial or Energy Department sites.