A newly inked deal has paved the way for Veolia Nuclear Solutions to demonstrate its patented GeoMelt technology to process radioactive waste sent from the Idaho National Laboratory (INL).
Under the agreement, announced Sept. 25, INL management and operations contractor Battelle Energy Alliance (BEA) will ship some drums with small amounts of radioactive contaminated sodium wastes to the Perma-Fix Northwest facility in Richland, Wash.
The residual sodium metal coolant from the Fermi nuclear power plant in Michigan, now housed at INL, will be processed as a treatability demonstration using the technology, said a spokesman for Veolia, Michael Crittenden. The waste is from the long-retired Fermi 1 reactor unit.
Neither Veolia nor Battelle immediately offered details on the scope or cost of the testing, although the parties described it as a long-term agreement.
“We have a strategic, long-term plan to establish pathways for off-site treatment of difficult waste streams,” Bob Miklos, director of production facilities and treatment, storage and disposal facilities at INL’s Materials and Fuels Complex, said in a news release.
“The BEA agreement for treatment of Fermi Drums is the first in what we hope will be a series of treatment demonstrations leading to eventual operations to treat and stabilize DOE and commercial reactive metal-containing waste,” Ryan Dodd, technology director at Veolia Nuclear Solutions – Federal Services, said in the same release.
The Veolia GeoMelt process involves in-container vitrification of sodium contaminated waste generated from some nuclear reactors. It turns the waste into a glass form for disposal.
GeoMelt has been around for a number of years, owned by Kurion before the company was bought by Veolia.
