The Department of Energy and its environmental contractor at the Idaho National Laboratory could start operating the Integrated Waste Treatment United any time now, a state spokesperson said Monday.
“They are planning to start simulant feed today,” a spokesperson with the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality, said Monday in response to an email inquiry from Exchange Monitor.
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. DOE spokespersons in Idaho did not immediately respond to an Exchange Monitor email Monday afternoon.
After a few weeks of operations of the 53,000-square-foot facility begin with simulant, as it did with a two-month test run last year, the contractor will gradually start mixing in the first of the 900,000 gallons of liquid radioactive sodium-bearing waste at the Idaho National Laboratory.
The waste is a byproduct of years of 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.