The U.S. Energy Department has not accounted for all costs associated with fixing the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit (IWTU) at the Idaho National Laboratory, according to a report released Monday by the Government Accountability Office.
In the report, GAO said the Energy Department has not followed best practices in that it failed to include both government and contractor expenses over the life of the project.
Decades of defense-related work at INL has left behind two types of material treated as high-level radioactive waste (HLW) by the Energy Department: 900,000 gallons of sodium-bearing waste, as well as 1.2 million gallons of highly radioactive granular calcine waste. Under an agreement with the state, DOE’s Office of Environmental Management must by 2035 treat the material and prepare it to be shipped out of the state.
But development of the IWTU, which would treat both types of waste, has been difficult. Although the facility was essentially finished in 2012 for $571 million, it has never worked as planned due to design problems, the GAO said in the report. The DOE nuclear cleanup office has worked since then to re-engineer the facility.
As of February, total construction and re-engineering costs amounted to $1 billion.
Energy Department officials in Idaho say the final trial run for operating the IWTU, this time using actual radioactive waste rather than a simulant, will start in early 2020. But Environmental Management and contractor Fluor Idaho have yet to decide if a maintenance outage to implement other tweaks is needed before the final test, the GAO said.
More challenges are ahead. For example, the Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico, the agency’s preferred disposal site for the Idaho waste, is not licensed to take HLW. High-level waste must be disposed of in a geologic repository unless the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission approves an alternative disposal site, according to the GAO report.
In 2013, the Energy Department filed a request with New Mexico to modify WIPP’s state hazardous waste permit. The revision sought to allow sodium waste to be sent to WIPP if DOE deemed the material “waste incidental to reprocessing,” which would clear the way for it to be treated as low-level waste. But the request was put on hold after an underground radiation leak at the facility in February 2014.
The Energy Department hopes its June reinterpretation of the definition of high-level waste could enable WIPP to take the material, the GAO noted. Prior experience suggests any suggestion to send HLW to WIPP will likely to encounter public opposition.
