2 tons of nuclear product shipped from Idaho

ARCO, Idaho (AP) — Almost 5,000 pounds of nuclear material containing highly enriched uranium has been moved out of Idaho to South Carolina and Tennessee, said officials overseeing the cleanup project.

That's the first shipment of many destined to leave the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory over the next five years.

The single shipment actually took place four months ahead of schedule in August.

But it was announced only Tuesday as the U.S. Department of Energy keeps a tight lid on details of nuclear-related activities at the site.

"We're going to get this stuff out safely," Stacey Francis, a spokeswoman for the Idaho Completion Project, the entity overseeing the clean up of nuclear waste generated from years of atomic research at the Eastern Idaho site.

The material — about 2.4 tons of a product called denitrator product — had been stored at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory since being produced by a fuel reprocessing project in 1992.

The material was shipped to the Department of Energy's Savannah River facility in South Carolina and Nuclear Fuel Services, Inc. in Erwin, Tenn., where it will be processed into commercial nuclear fuel and used to generate electricity in reactors.

Francis said the ICP is under contract to have the entire stock of 40 different classifications of nuclear material moved offsite to an appropriate destination by September 2009.