Idaho News

  The glovebox excavator method project bred new life into the prospect that buried waste could be exhumed from Pit 9 and other pits within a 97-acre landfill known as the Subsurface Disposal Area at the DOE Idaho National Laboratory Site.
DOE, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and state of Idaho signed a record of decision to clean up a pit within a waste repository at the DOE Idaho National Laboratory Site using a chemical extraction process, which later proved unsuccessful.
Crews at left perform stacked waste disposal at the Subsurface Disposal Area at the Idaho National Laboratory Site in the 1950s. At right, workers use a lifting tractor trailer to dispose of waste at the landfill in the 1960s.
Just months after the Experimental Breeder Reactor-I began generating electricity in December 1951 in a historic first, the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) Site opened its first waste repository on the 890-square-mile Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) site.