What was shaping up to be a productive trial run of the long-delayed Integrated Waste Unit was cut short just after New Year’s, about a third of the way through its planned duration, because of weather-related supply-chain issues, a state official said Monday.
The Integrated Waste Treatment Unit (IWTU) started its 50-day run, loaded with a non-radioactive stimulant of the liquid waste it was designed to solidify, on Dec. 27. The plant is supposed to convert sodium-bearing waste into a stable granular form.
“Unfortunately, the run was paused on January 6 when the facility could not get the volume of nitrogen from the supplier needed for operation,” Brian English, hazardous waste permits supervisor at the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality, said.
Nitrogen is a carrier gas used in multiple facets of the waste treatment unit, English said by phone. The plant uses several truck shipments of nitrogen daily and last week there was “snow, snow and more snow” snarling traffic, he added. The state is awaiting word on what the facility will do to ensure an adequate supply of materials to conduct operations, including nitrogen, English said.
A spokesperson for the Department of Energy said the IWTU outage will not be an “extended delay,” and that the unit was functioning as designed before the shutdown.
The unit “to date has successfully converted more than 19,000 gallons of liquid simulant into a stable, granular form,” the DOE spokesperson wrote in an email this week. “We anticipate resuming the confirmatory run soon.”
In early November a DOE manager in Idaho, Joel Case, told the Radwaste Summit in Nevada, an event organized by ExchangeMonitor Publications, that then-contractor Fluor Idaho was preparing to start the 50-day run. Fluor Idaho turned over reins of the Idaho Cleanup Project, including operation of the waste treatment unit, to the Jacobs-led Idaho Environmental Coalition on Jan. 1.
The IWTU has had a difficult history. Construction of the plant, designed to treat roughly 850,000 gallons of highly radioactive sodium-bearing liquid tank waste left over from spent fuel reprocessing, was largely finished in 2012 by a former contractor, but it never worked as planned. Fluor-Idaho spent much of the past several years tweaking and re-engineering the project.
Last year the state gave DOE until September 2022 to successfully fill the first canisters of granular waste at IWTU. The deadline was previously June 2021.
Editor’s Note, Jan. 12, 2022, 2:43 p.m. Eastern. The story was changed to show that the demonstration run started on Dec. 27, and to include comment from the Department of Energy.
