The state of Idaho made the Department of Energy pay about $10 million in penalties so far for its failure to clean up high-level sodium bearing radioactive waste at the Idaho National Laboratory, something the agency hopes to do before Jan. 1.
Although DOE has yet to set a start-up date for radiological operation of the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit (IWTU) at Idaho, the long-anticipated facility successfully completed its federal readiness assessment on Aug. 18, a DOE spokesperson said Thursday in an email.
The IWTU recently completed a 65-day final confirmatory run using a simulant fluid as a stand-in for radioactive waste. The facility, designed to solidify 900,000 gallons of sodium-bearing liquid waste into a granular form for disposal, is undergoing a planned outage. During the downtime, the Idaho site contractor planned to inspect the plant, do routine maintenance and fix newly-identified problems, according to the DOE spokesperson.
“To date, no required major modifications to the IWTU have been identified based on the initial results of the ongoing facility inspections,” the federal spokesperson said. A more specific start-up date will be set with the state after the inspection ends, the spokesperson added.
That could come soon.
A July 2021 order from the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality gives DOE until Sept. 30, 2022 to fill the first canister with granular waste using the steam reforming technology at IWTU.
The feds and their Jacobs-led contractor, Idaho Environmental Coalition, have until the end of December to fill 100 canisters. An earlier state milestone had DOE filling the first canister by June 2021, but as was the case with other big projects, the feds received extra time to compensate for work time lost due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
William (Ike) White, senior adviser for the DOE Office of Environmental Management, said in July that he anticipates startup of radioactive waste operations by the end of the year.
Delay generated millions in civil penalties from the state
The IWTU has a long and difficult history.
A previous Idaho contractor, led by CH2M, now part of Jacobs, initially finished building the plant a decade ago to clean up the sodium-bearing waste left over from nuclear fuel reprocessing.
“However, during system testing of the facility in June 2012, the IWTU experienced a malfunction that damaged equipment and revealed problems with the facility’s design and inadequate oversight and management systems,” the Government Accountability Office reported in September 2019, citing DOE documents.
The Idaho Environmental Coalition took over as Idaho Cleanup Project contractor in January from Fluor Idaho, which had spent several years re-engineering and overhauling major components in the IWTU.
Starting in 2015, Idaho has assessed DOE daily civil penalties for its failure to start up IWTU under a legal settlement dating to 1995 on nuclear fuel storage in Idaho.
Through this week the total amounted to about $12.25 million, though Idaho forgave a portion of the fines because of COVID, Kim Custer, a senior hazardous waste permit writer for the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality, said in a Wednesday email.
Of that total, Idaho deducted more than $2.3 million for time lost due to the pandemic, reducing the sum to less than $9.9 million.
In lieu of cash payments to the state, DOE retired nearly $8.4 million of the fines by doing supplemental environmental projects in the state. However, the federal agency has directly paid about $1.49 million in fines, Custer said.
The penalties, currently set at about $6,000 daily, keep being assessed until pending performance of the canister production milestones.
The DOE and its contractor finished the two-month dress rehearsal for IWTU radiological operations in late July. That was after plant operators tried unsuccessfully between late December 2021 and about May to get the facility to run for 50 straight days. During that time, the aborted test run was bedeviled by everything from human error to equipment problems to securing a reliable daily supply of nitrogen.
