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May 3, 2016

Deadline looms, future in limbo, for nuclear waste plant in Idaho

By LUKE RAMSETH
Post Register

IDAHO FALLS, Idaho — A darkened central control room with more than 25 computer screens watches over nearly everything occurring inside this radioactive waste treatment plant west of Idaho Falls.

The room is where employees at the Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project, or AMWTP, monitor and manipulate the facility's dangerous waste treatment process from afar. Decades-old metal boxes and drums filled with radioactive waste travel through a series of conveyor belts and elevators. At various stages the waste is remotely sorted, repackaged, smashed up, and then packaged again. A final product of multiple 55-gallon drums is shipped on trucks to waste repositories located in New Mexico, Nevada and Utah.


 
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