Cost Savings in Idaho Help Accelerate Cleanup Work

Decontamination and demolition continues at the Submarine 1st Generation Westinghouse building at the Naval Reactors Facility at the Idaho National Laboratory Site.

IDAHO FALLS, Idaho — The Idaho Cleanup Project (ICP) has logged a series of performance and cost efficiency victories, allowing it to reinvest associated savings into more cleanup work.

The ICP’s 10-year cleanup contract with the Idaho Environmental Coalition (IEC) is broken up into large, individual tasks, each with their own contract identifying cleanup mission objectives, costs, schedule and resource needs. The U.S. Department of Energy Office of Environmental Management (EM) and IEC agree to all conditions before the work begins.

Three years into the contract, much of the work to date has been completed months ahead of schedule and under budget. In fact, identifying efficiencies is the rule rather than the exception.

Most recently, IEC’s Waste Management Program began using ultrasonic testing technology to validate transuranic waste drum integrity. Management estimates use of this technology will lead to a minimum cost savings of $26 million. The technology scans the drums to ensure they have a required thickness, and if they do, they don’t need to be placed in overpack containers prior to shipment for emplacement at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant underground repository in New Mexico. That means the program saves money on the cost of the overpack containers, which are expensive to manufacture.

A subcontract employee monitors a demonstration of ultrasonic testing technology to ensure transuranic waste drum integrity at the Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project at the Idaho National Laboratory Site.

Additionally, IEC has realized $8 million in savings through fuel purchasing and onsite materials testing, and $19 million through efficiencies within its U.S. Navy decontamination and demolition effort.

“We purposely designed this contract to be aggressive with an end state in mind,” said Mark Brown, EM program manager with ICP. “Completing this important work safely, efficiently and ahead of schedule creates tangible cost savings, which are applied to accelerate other work or applied to additional work scope.”

When IEC completes a project, it retrains workers, if necessary, for new roles in the cleanup program, drawing from the existing workforce rather than hiring externally. The contractor recently employed this strategy for the Accelerated Retrieval Project (ARP), in which workers deactivated and demolished 11.9 acres of buried waste retrieval enclosures two months ahead of schedule.

ARP management also transferred excess materials and equipment to other projects, resulting in cost savings over the purchase of new items.

With the same intent to realize efficiencies, legacy buildings — such as a liquid waste treatment building or a spent nuclear fuel storage facility — have been modified for other projects, often at cost savings in the tens of millions of dollars.

An Idaho State Police officer inspects the Idaho Cleanup Project’s 7,500th shipment of transuranic waste before it departs Idaho for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.

“Our team, in partnership with DOE, began proactively implementing cost reduction measures in 2023 that have resulted in bringing our current spending levels below what they were even in fiscal year 2022,” IEC President Dan Coyne said. “We owe our success to the partnership we have established with DOE and to our workforce’s excellence in solving complex issues and performing safe, compliant work.”

Looking ahead, EM and IEC are focused on completing construction of an onsite landfill for legacy waste debris and demolition debris from Navy prototype propulsion plant decontamination and demolition efforts, maintaining offsite waste shipments, continuing liquid waste treatment at the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit, and finishing the final cover over a remediated Cold War-era landfill.

-Contributor: Erik Simpson