IDAHO FALLS, Idaho – EM and cleanup contractor Fluor Idaho have finished processing a challenging liquid waste form dubbed “squeezants,” allowing the material to be sent from the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) Site to an out-of-state permanent disposal facility.

“This was a great effort on the part of our crews to safely treat this material and prepare it for shipment to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) or other off-site facility for compliant disposal,” said Ross Langseth, Fluor Idaho operations manager at the INL Site’s Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project (AMWTP).

The radioactive and hazardous liquid wastes were generated by AMWTP’s supercompactor when 55-gallon waste drums were crushed with 4 million pounds of force to create what resemble 5-inch-thick hockey pucks to reduce their shipping and storage volume. Squeezants are the liquids that were "squeezed" out of the waste drums by the supercompactor. The squeezants captured in the supercompactor’s sump were later moved to 4-liter jars and placed into 55-gallon drums.

Those drums were transferred to six drum overpacks and brought into one of the facility’s boxlines where the squeezants were soaked up by an absorbent and blended with debris waste. The material was then put in 55-gallon drums and compacted in the supercompactor. Boxlines are huge concrete and metal hot cells where containers of radioactive waste are opened and sorted without exposing workers to the materials inside.

Since 2003, workers at AMWTP have retrieved, treated, packaged, certified, and shipped an inventory of 65,000 cubic meters of transuranic and low-level wastes generated during nuclear weapons production at the former Rocky Flats Plant and other Cold War facilities. The waste was shipped to the INL Site for above-ground storage from 1970 to the late 1980s. AMWTP completed treatment of transuranic debris waste in October 2019 and is scheduled to continue sending that waste to WIPP throughout the next decade.

“Our crews are some of the best in the business when it comes to dispositioning challenging wastes,” Langseth said. “We prove each and every time that it can be done safely.”