CHALLENGES FOR REMEDIATING WASTE BURIED AT THE IDAHO NATIONALENGINEERING AND ENVIRONMENTAL LABORATORY

摘要

The Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory’s (INEEL’s) EnvironmentalRestoration Program staff have devised an effective strategy for investigating how to bestremediate waste buried before 1970 at the site’s Radioactive Waste Management Complex(RWMC).The U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the state of Idahohave initiated a remedial investigation/feasibility study, which will describe remedial alternativesand provide information that decision-makers will use to compare remedial alternatives. Arecord of decision could be signed in late 2003.Today, the Subsurface Disposal Area (SDA), a 97-acre area of the RWMC where wastes wereburied, is one of the world’s best-documented landfills, in terms of waste inventory knowledgeand the locations of its wastes. For each of the waste types in the SDA, INEEL has detaileddisposal records that indicate disposal locations and quantities. This information has beencompiled into a comprehensive database. Process knowledge of how the wastes were generatedalso is relatively complete.In addition to historical knowledge, current technical approaches to verify waste content andlocations include magnetic surveys, shallow surface soil vapor surveys, and probing. Extensivegroundwater and vadose zone monitoring is underway to gain information about contaminantmigration and potential migration. Data from waste retrievals performed as early as 1968 arepart of the project file.Additional data-gathering tasks include work to determine: the nature and extent of thecontamination; the mass of volatile organic compounds remaining in the waste; the rates thaturanium and carbon-14 are being released from the waste; influence of the nearby Big Lost Riversystem on waste migration; locations of specific waste streams; and implementability and costsof remedies.This knowledge will allow a technically defensible remedial investigation/feasibility study toserve as the foundation for selecting the best approach to remediate the SDA.Depending on the remedy approach selected, remediating the SDA could cost billions of dollars.This decision will be the most closely watched of any cleanup project to date at the INEEL andwill continue to attract national attention.