One of the last major milestones before radiological operation can start at the long-awaited Integrated Waste Treatment Unit at the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory is scheduled to begin this week.
A 10-day “heat up” period is set to start Tuesday followed by a 50-day demonstration run of the plant, Brian English, a manager with the waste and remediation division of the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality, said in an email late Friday.
If the demonstration run goes to plan, the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit could start processing radioactive waste as soon any time after the new Idaho Cleanup Project contractor, Jacobs-led Idaho Environmental Coalition, takes over. The team began its transition Oct. 1 and was scheduled to take over cleanup work at the site around Jan. 1.
The new contractor has some breathing room after New Year’s, however. In August the state of Idaho gave DOE an extension until September 2022, from June 2021, to successfully fill the first canisters of granular waste at IWTU.
Meanwhile, the Idaho DEQ is taking public comment on modifications to the hazardous waste permit for IWTU through 5 p.m. Mountain Time on Nov. 12, English said. The modifications include: replacement of metal filter elements in the plant’s Process Gas Filter with ceramic filter elements; changes to the wet and dry radiological decontamination systems and other tweaks, according to a fact sheet on the public comment period that started Sept. 28.
The demonstration run scheduled to begin this week is supposed to wrap up around Christmas. After that, DOE, the state and contractor Fluor Idaho, will verify that fixes made following earlier tests show the IWTU is ready to run with radioactive waste. That is according to an Oct. 21 presentation to the Idaho Citizens Advisory Board by Joel Case, assistant manager of DOE’s Idaho Nuclear Technical and Engineering Center at the laboratory.
IWTU is meant to use steam reforming technology to convert about 900,000 gallons of highly radioactive sodium-bearing liquid tank waste, left over from spent fuel reprocessing, into a solid, granular form. A prior contractor, CH2M-WG Idaho first built the unit in 2012 but it never worked as planned. Fluor Idaho has re-engineered certain key parts of the facility in recent years, according to DOE.
Steam reforming is an alternative to glass-making vitrification plants already used at the Savannah River Site, and planned for the Hanford Site, to solidify liquid radioactive waste leftover from Cold War-era national defense work, including plutonium production.
