Idaho Falls, Idaho – Crews have begun excavating Cold War-era weapons waste from a second burial site at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Radioactive Waste Management Complex in the eastern Idaho desert.
Cleanup work at the facility, within the 890-square-mile Idaho National Laboratory, began in 2005.
So far, the recovery project has focused on excavating radioactive and hazardous wastes, repackaging the materials, then shipping them in trucks for permanent disposal at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.
The majority of the waste material came from the Rocky Flats nuclear-weapons plant near Denver. From the 1950s through 1970, the waste materials were shipped in drums to Idaho and buried in a 97-acre section of the INL facility, said Amy Lientz, spokeswoman for the Idaho Cleanup Project.
For the past two years, workers have concentrated on wastes buried in a single pit about 20 feet below the desert surface.
Earlier this month, crews expanded the recovery to a second pit nearby, she said.
The materials in both pits contain some of the highest accumulation of plutonium and other volatile organic compounds, which pose the greatest threat to the underlying Snake River Plain Aquifer, a Lake Erie-sized reservoir nearly 600 feet beneath the burial sites.
