The Integrated Waste Treatment Unit at the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory, offline since September, should start heating up next month and resume treating sodium-bearing radioactive waste in March, an agency spokesperson said Tuesday.
The extended outage at the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit (IWTU), held in part to replace carbon beds used to remove mercury from liquid waste, formally ended Saturday Jan. 20, the spokesperson said in an email reply to an Exchange Monitor inquiry.
There is some pre-heat-up work going on between now and mid-February, the spokesperson said. IWTU solidifies radioactive liquid sodium-bearing waste into a granular form in early March. Jacobs-led site prime Idaho Environmental Coalition operates the facility.
The 53,000-square-foot facility treated 68,000 gallons out of up to 900,000 gallons at the Idaho site between April and September of 2023. Then it went out of service for maintenance a few months earlier than expected.
In hopes of extending the lifespan of the granulated activated carbon beds, the contractor submitted a revision of the IWTU safety basis and fire hazards analysis to DOE, according to a recent Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board report dated Jan. 5.
DOE approved revisions to allow pre-heating of beds during startup, the board said, adding the contractor could issue a revised safety document by the end of next month.
The IWTU has a long and difficult history. A contractor led by CH2M, now part of Jacobs, initially built the plant in 2012 but it never-worked as planned. Over the years subsequent primes, Fluor Idaho and the Idaho Environmental Coalition made dozens of engineering modifications and changes to the fluidized bed facility before it started radioactive operations last year.
