DOE: IDAHO WASTE TREATMENT FACILITY TO NOW BEGIN OPERATION BY LATE APRIL

The Department of Energy is now projecting that the Idaho Sodium-Bearing Waste Treatment Facility will begin operation by the end of April. The SBWT Facility, which has had a history of cost and schedule issues, is intended to treat by the end of this year the approximately 900,000 gallons of liquid waste remaining at DOE’s Idaho site to meet an Idaho Settlement Agreement milestone. Yesterday, contractor CH2M-WG Idaho kicked off an Operational Readiness Review slated to last for two weeks. “It was a good effort to get to that point,” Ken Picha, acting DOE deputy assistant secretary for tank waste and nuclear materials, said yesterday in remarks at this year’s Waste Management Symposia in Phoenix. “They did some prudent things as they were planning that and [we] expect that based upon the work they did ahead to get ready for that, it will be a successful endeavor.”

Once CWI completes its ORR, the Department is currently scheduled to conduct a similar review of its own of the SBWT Facility in March. “Hopefully if the contractor ORR and the DOE ORR is successful … if there are not many pre-start items, they can start into operations maybe earlier in April,” Picha said. DOE has previously said that a 10-month campaign would be needed to treat all of the remaining liquid waste at the Idaho site. Even with the shortened schedule because of the new projected start-up date, though, DOE still believes it can have the waste treated in time to meet the Idaho Settlement Agreement milestone. “Given even I think … a four-week planned outage that is just for contingency purposes—they don’t have anything specifically identified—that they an still get all of that done by the end of the year,” Picha said.