Tour the Idaho National Lab – Your radioactive backyard
On Thursday, August 31, 2017, Snake River Alliance members and supporters can visit the Idaho National Laboratory. Our tours are great opportunities to get a real sense of what has happened and is happening at the Idaho National Lab. Here’s what we’ll see first-hand.
- Radioactive Waste Management Complex, where plutonium from weapons production was buried above the Snake River Aquifer, and the Superfund project to dig up targeted waste is nearly complete.
- Idaho Nuclear Technology and Engineering Center, where you’ll see 1) remote-handled plutonium waste being stabilized in a very large hot cell, 2) the government’s largest spent nuclear fuel storage pool, and 3) the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit, where a project to treat liquid high-level waste is over budget and behind schedule.
- Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project, where plutonium-contaminated waste is sorted and compacted to ship off-site sometime in the future.
The tour will run from 9 am to about 4 pm. It will be a long, challenging day, filled with juxtapositions. You will be close to but protected from very dangerous material. The Arco Desert, at the base of the Lemhi and Lost River ranges, is one of the most beautiful parts of our state. Humans have lived there for more than 13,000 years. Beneath INL, sixty years of nuclear contamination threatens the sole source of drinking water for 300,000 Idahoans downstream. Come see it for yourself.
If you have questions or already know you would like to go on the tour, please contact our nuclear program director, Beatrice Brailsford, at [email protected].