The U.S. Department of Energy is studying vitrification technologies as options for treating 1.2 million gallons of calcine, a high-level radioactive waste at the Idaho National Laboratory, a DOE advisory board heard Thursday, Feb. 21.
DOE is looking at options from three prospective suppliers: an Atkins-Catholic University joint venture, Orano and Veolia, said Valerie Kimbro, a nuclear waste manager for Jacobs-led Idaho Environmental Coalition, at a Thursday meeting of a DOE Citizen Advisory Board for Idaho cleanup.
These three providers have experience in vitrifying dry, high-level waste into a stable glass-like solid, said Connie Flohr, the soon-to-depart DOE cleanup field manager in Idaho.
DOE wants to use a method for calcine solidification that already has a track record and it does not want to pioneer something from scratch, Flohr said.
Flohr last week accompanied Jeff Avery, the No. 2 executive at the DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, on a visit to Orano and Alternative Atomic Energies Commission facilities.
A link to the calcine vitrification slides and other presentations at the Idaho advisory board meeting can be found here. Calcine is a byproduct of legacy fuel reprocessing at the Idaho federal complex. DOE had once hoped it might be able to tweak its Integrated Waste Treatment Unit, which last year started testing liquid sodium-bearing waste, to solidify the calcine. In 2019, the Government Accountability Office called upon DOE to identify calcine treatment options.
DOE did an analysis of alternatives on calcine in 2021, Kimbro said. As part of its research, DOE has looked at vitrification technologies used at the Hanford Site in Washington state as well as La Hague in France and Texas, she added.
