The Department of Energy and its cleanup contractor at the Idaho National Laboratory started operating the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit Monday with simulant, an agency official told a local citizens group on Thursday.
After completing plant warm up over the weekend, “we are processing simulant as we speak,” DOE’s deputy manager of the Idaho Cleanup Project, Mark Brown told the Idaho Cleanup Project Citizens Advisory Board.
The plant is processing less than one-and-a-half gallons per minute currently, Brown said. After two-to-four weeks of processing the simulant, the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit (IWTU), should start treating “real waste” sometime in March, he added.
The exact date is something of a “moving target,” Brown said. Treatment of radioactive waste will begin only after the project conducts emissions tests and receives approvals from DOE Office of Environmental Management headquarters in Washington, D.C., said Brown.
“Headquarters is the one that can authorize us to process radioactive waste,” Brown said. The final call will be made by Greg Sosson, who heads safety, security, and quality assurance, for DOE’s nuclear cleanup office, Brown said.
Sosson has been involved with IWTU “for a lot of years” and will be briefed in the next couple of weeks, Brown said.
A Monday startup with simulant tracks with what the Exchange Monitor heard earlier in the week from an Idaho Department of Environmental Quality representative.
Radiological operations will initially start with a blend of waste and simulant to ensure the 53,000-square-foot plant operates as expected, Brown said. Barring an unexpected shutdown, plant operations will continue “until we finish processing the first tank of waste.”
A DOE spokesperson said last week the feds and Jacobs-led contractor Idaho Environmental Coalition were doing a few “minor instrument repairs” prior to starting to operate the simulant.
The IWTU performed well in an 88-day test run of the facility with simulant last summer, Brown said. The plant is meant to treat 900,000 gallons of liquid radioactive sodium-bearing waste at the Idaho National Laboratory.
The waste is a byproduct of years of nuclear fuel reprocessing at the laboratory’s Idaho Nuclear Technology and Engineering Center, according to the contractor. The steam-reforming plant is designed to convert the liquid waste into a more stable granular form for long-term storage and eventual disposal.
The $1-billion-plus facility was first built in 2012 by a contractor team led by CH2M, now a subsidiary of Jacobs. The plant never worked as it was supposed to, however, and the next contractor Fluor Idaho spent years re-engineering and revamping key parts of the plant. The responsibility for the project shifted to the Idaho Environmental Coalition in January 2022.
Exchange Monitor Editor Dan Leone contributed to this article.