Veolia Nuclear Solutions Federal Services last week dedicated a new low-level radioactive waste vitrification facility at the Waste Control Specialists site in Andrews County, Texas, according to a release on LinkedIn.
Veolia Nuclear Solutions Federal Services (VNS Federal Services), which is a Department of Energy contractor, held a ribbon-cutting ceremony June 15 for its new GeoMelt vitrification facility located at the Waste Control Specialists (WCS) disposal site in West Texas, according to a corporate posting on LinkedIn.
“The Andrews GeoMelt system was designed in part to further the disposition of DOE sodium-contaminated, reactive metal and other previously orphaned and commercial mixed low-level waste,” according to the LinkedIn notice.
The Veolia company designed, built and will operate the facility, which a company official likened to a “10-ton melter” that can vitrify certain low-level wastes into a glass form for disposal there at WCS. The official declined to say how much the facility cost to design and build.
It took 18 months to design and build the GeoMelt plant, which completed its first melt of certain materials from the Idaho National Laboratory, the company source said.
The facility can take relatively small batches and operate on an as-needed basis, so it is not a plant that is expected to run around-the-clock, the company official said. A two-minute Veolia video on the GeoMelt technology can be viewed here.
Veolia’s GeoMelt technology has already treated 26,000 metric tons of radioactive and hazardous waste, much of it in the United States, according to a November 2021 joint release from Veolia and the EDF Group that announced the international companies’ formation of a new Waste2Glass joint venture.
More than three years ago, Veolia developed a GeoMelt facility for use at the Perma-Fix Environmental Services plant near Richland, Wash. Almost six years ago, Kurion, a company subsequently bought by Veolia, began operating a GeoMelt facility at the United Kingdom’s National Nuclear Laboratory’s Central Laboratory at Sellafield.
