Buried Nuclear Waste is Threatening Idaho's Water

Summary | Background and Current Situation | Update

Summary: Hazardous and radioactive waste is buried above the Snake River Aquifer, threatening the drinking water of nearly 300,000 people. Waste that threatens the aquifer must be dug up.

Background and Current Situation: The Subsurface Disposal Area began as a shallow land burial site for the Idaho National Laboratory’s waste. INL waste buried there even includes old reactor parts. The burial grounds have expanded over the years, primarily to accommodate nuclear waste from the Rocky Flats, Colorado, factory that made plutonium triggers for nuclear weapons. The 88-acre plot now includes 16 pits and 54 trenches, all unlined.

“Low-level” radioactive waste not mixed with hazardous chemicals from INL is still being buried in the unlined pits.

Most of the 750,000 barrels, boxes, and crates from Rocky Flats no longer contain their waste, and the radionuclides, heavy metals, and toxic chemicals they held are now free to move through the soil. Much of the radioactivity in this waste is long-lived, meaning it will remain hazardous for hundreds or hundreds of thousands of years. So will the heavy metals and toxic chemicals.

The burial grounds sit less than 600 feet above the Snake River Aquifer, North America’s second-largest unified aquifer. It’s the sole source of drinking water for nearly 300,000 people and is the lifeblood of southern Idaho’s agriculture and aquaculture economies. Radioactive contamination, including small amounts of plutonium and uranium, has been found in the aquifer below the burial grounds. A substantial amount of organic solvents have also reached Idaho’s drinking water. A report by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research concludes that the long-term protection of the Snake River Aquifer requires the removal of nuclear and hazardous wastes to ensure groundwater isn’t contaminated further.

Decades ago, the federal government promised that the buried waste would be dug up, and since that time the people of Idaho have demanded this promise be kept. But the demand has met with steady resistance. The Department of Energy is in a court fight with the State of Idaho, which asserts that a 1995 settlement agreement gave even more legal weight to the DOE’s obligation. During its search for a new contractor to clean up INL, the DOE sharply limited the amount of waste to be retrieved from the burial grounds. Increasingly, it seems likely the DOE will perform some limited retrieval and then propose abandoning the bulk of the waste where it is. We expect regulators from the State of Idaho and the US Environmental Protection Agency to demand additional work.

In the meantime, beryllium reactor parts have been coated with paraffin and some plutonium-contaminated waste is finally being removed from the ground above Idaho’s drinking water. During a pilot project called the Glovebox Excavator Method (GEM), the DOE removed 75 cubic meters of waste at a cost of $1 million per cubic meter. Based on that project, the DOE asserts operators can visually identify waste that is most heavily contaminated with plutonium. Targeted removal of uranium and plutonium mixed with organic solvents, which lubricate the path from surface to groundwater, is going forward in a portion of Pit 4 and more is planned there and in Pit 6.

This winter, though, three barrels burst into flame as they were dug up. Workers could douse the fire without leaving their protected area, but the incident has stopped exhumation at the burial grounds.

Update: As part of the Superfund process, the DOE has prepared and the regulators have reviewed a “remedial investigation and baseline risk assessment,” detailing what’s in the burial grounds and how much risk it poses. The Alliance will be reviewing these analyses in the coming months. The Superfund “feasibility study” outlining what can be done to limit the risk was made public on June 29, 2007.  In late summer 2007 the DOE, EPA, and State of Idaho will release a proposed cleanup plan for public comment.  We can expect public hearings in early fall 2007.