The Department of Energy and its environmental management contractor at the Idaho National Laboratory hope to resume a test run of the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit by the end of the month, an Idaho state official said Thursday.
As of Tuesday Jan. 18, managers at the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit (IWTU) envisioned having a nitrogen supply issue resolved within 10 days, Brian English, hazardous waste permits supervisor with the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality, said in a Thursday email.
Currently, the IWTU is shut down and the restart will require a heat-up period of about 10 days before DOE and its Jacobs-led contractor, the Idaho Environmental Coalition, can resume the 50-day demonstration run halted Jan. 6, English added.
“The IWTU restart schedule will be dependent on resolution of the nitrogen supply issue,” English said.
DOE is counting on the long-delayed facility, completed in 2012 and tinkered with since, to solidify between 850,000 and 900,000 gallons of sodium-bearing, radioactive waste left over from spent fuel reprocessing into a more stable, granular form that will be stored in stainless steel canisters.
But a 50-day demonstration run with a simulant in late December got off to a rocky start and had to be suspended Jan. 6 because of problems with nitrogen shipments to the laboratory.
Large amounts of nitrogen gas are used in the 53,000-square-foot steam-reforming plant at the Idaho National Laboratory. Truck shipments of the nitrogen needed at the plant became unreliable during a winter storm earlier this month, forcing the Jan. 6 suspension of the demonstration run, the state official has said.
A DOE spokesperson Friday declined to go into specifics on when the test run is expected to resume. The spokesperson again said the federal agency is working with the contractor to ensure adequate supplies of nitrogen and hopes to resume the demonstration run soon. Between Dec. 27 and Jan. 6, the IWTU processed 19,000 gallons of simulant.
The 50-day trial, followed by an outage to work out any remaining kinks, is one of the last hurdles prior to regular operations with the liquid sodium-bearing waste. The waste is now held in three underground storage tanks within a tank farm at the laboratory’s Idaho Nuclear Technology and Engineering Center.
Steam reforming technology has been used in petrochemical processes. A panel appointed through the National Academies of Science is also studying steam reforming as an option, along with vitrification and grouting, for some of the low-activity radioactive tank waste at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
The IWTU has a difficult history, as the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in a September 2019 report. The plant was first built in 2012 by an earlier contractor, WGI-Idaho but never worked as planned. The subsequent contractor, Fluor Idaho, reworked significant parts of the plant to get it to the current stage, before turning over operation to the Idaho Environmental Coalition this month.
