Boxes and barrels of plutonium-contaminated tools, machinery and clothes shipped to the Idaho desert in the 1970s and early 1980s fill a building the size of four football fields.
More waste sits in nearby buildings.
Much of it, buried under 3 feet to 5 feet of soil, hasn't been touched in 30 years.
But in the next few weeks, BNFL Inc. crews will start unearthing those boxes and barrels filled with industrial waste from the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant in Colorado.
They'll catalog the contents, sometimes sorting and repackaging the waste, and ship it to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.
BNFL officials are eager to begin operations.
"We're all driven to process the waste as fast as can be done safely and get it out of Idaho," said Frederick Hughes, general manager of the Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project facility, where the waste will be sorted, processed and shipped.
BNFL officials started a readiness check of the plant last week by reviewing procedures and plans. Department of Energy officials are scheduled to inspect the plant in early February.
Work must get under way by the end of March to comply with a 1995 settlement agreement between the state and the DOE, which stipulates when waste stored at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory must leave Idaho.
It's a big job.
It took about four years to process and ship the first 3,100 cubic meters of INEEL waste destined for the WIPP.
BNFL crews must retrieve, process and ship more than 20 times that much waste - 65,000 cubic meters - in about 15 years.
The agreement calls for the waste to be out of Idaho by December 2018, although the agreement has a target completion date of December 2015.
BNFL officials estimate they'll finish the work much sooner. They plan to be done by 2012.
To do that, crews will be working 24 hours a day, processing 110 drums a day - about a drum every five minutes.
About 250 people already are working for BNFL, many of whom were laid off last year from the Astaris phosphorus plant in Pocatello. Officials expect to eventually hire another 100 workers.
BNFL officials are confident they can do the job, saying the Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project was designed for production, not as a demonstration project.
"It's designed for the high through-put rates," BNFL spokeswoman Ann Riedesel said. "That's what the facility was designed to do."
The characterization building, where boxes and barrels are X-rayed so their contents can be catalogued, includes two production lines to handle boxes and a third to handle barrels.
The building where the waste is processed also has multiple production lines and a 62-ton state-of-the-art Super-compactor that crushes the 55-gallon drums of waste to a fifth of their size for easy shipping.
There's plenty of incentive for BNFL to get the work done quickly.
The company has invested $440 million in the project so far and won't get the bulk of that money back until it starts shipping waste to the WIPP.
BNFL's fixed-price contract - a contractor is paid a set amount of money for doing a specific job - is fairly unique at the INEEL.
But it's a concept that's gaining popularity within the DOE, DOE spokesman Tim Jackson said.
"It ties contractors to performance, and that saves taxpayers money," he said.
BNFL won't make a lot of money on the project. Officials estimate they'll break even, but the Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project is a flagship project within the company because it's a chance to show what BNFL is capable of, said Philip Strawbridge, the company's new chief executive officer.
"We see there's a tremendous amount of opportunity from a business perspective, and we are hopeful that based upon our performance and based upon our investment that we'll be more and more in-volved as opportunities come about," Strawbridge said.
The project hasn't been without its setbacks.
The original proposal inclu-ded an incinerator to dispose of waste that can't be processed and sent to the WIPP because it contains high levels of PCBs, synthetic organic chemicals or volatile organic compounds.
DOE and BNFL officials scratched the incinerator plan when environmental groups protested, but they have yet to come up with a way to treat that waste.
Riedesel expects a decision by 2006.
State officials responsible for overseeing the waste agreement are concerned that the DOE hasn't yet said how it will handle that waste.
"We still want to see a strategy mapped out for resolving that problem," said Kathleen Trever, head of the State INEEL Oversight Office. "Now, DOE's strategy seems to be seeking regulatory relief, and that's not reasonable."
But overall, Trever said she's pleased the plant will begin operations soon.
"BNFL has done a good job of working under changing dynamics," Trever said. "We're optimistic that the facility will be up and running by the deadline."
Hughes is relieved to have the construction finished and eager to get the plant into production.
"We've been contracted to get the waste out of Idaho, and getting the plant finished ahead of the milestone gets us a stop closer to that," he said.
INEEL Reporter Margaret Wim-borne can be reached at 542-6757, or via e-mail at mwimborne@idahonews.com.
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