There is still no timetable for starting up the officially delayed Integrated Waste Treatment Unit at the Department of Energy’s Idaho Site, but it will need a replacement part — which DOE has in stock — that will take up to three months to install, according to an agency briefing last week.
DOE this week uploaded slides from the briefing, which were delivered Oct. 28 by Jack Zimmerman, deputy manager of the Idaho Cleanup Project, to members of the Idaho National Laboratory Site Environmental Management Citizens Advisory Board in Sun Valley, Idaho.
According to Zimmerman’s presentation, the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit (IWTU) needs a new ring header “because of erosion impacts.” Zimmerman said in May it would take between one and three months to swap out the ruined ring header for a spare.
IWTU, a so-called steam reformer, is designed to treat some 900,000 gallons of liquid radioactive waste generated from spent fuel reprocessing and now stored in underground tanks by heating up the material and distilling solids that can be packaged for permanent disposal. Some have questioned whether the technology is well-suited to DOE liquid-nuclear-waste cleanup, but the agency is standing by the device.
The 53,000-square-foot IWTU, built by former Idaho cleanup prime contractor CH2M-WG Idaho, is projected to cost upward of $570 million. DOE on Sept. 30 blew a legal deadline to begin operating the system, which has been substantially complete since 2012 but never worked correctly in trials. The state began fining DOE $3,600 a day on Oct. 1. Daily fines will mount to $6,000 after March 30.
Some of DOE’s thinking about the timeline for IWTU could be part of the fiscal 2018 federal budget request the next president is nominally scheduled to send to Congress in February.
Idaho AG Still Dug In on Spent Fuel
Also at the citizens group meeting, Idaho’s attorney general reiterated his stance that no spent nuclear fuel should be sent to the Idaho National Laboratory until the Energy Department begins treating liquid waste using the long-delayed IWTU, the local Post Register newspaper reported last week.
At the Oct. 28 meeting, Idaho Attorney General Lawrence Wasden again cited his authority under the 1995 Settlement Agreement between Idaho, DOE, and the U.S. Navy to bar a shipment of spent nuclear fuel to Idaho for a DOE research project until the agency starts up the IWTU, the Post Register reported.
Wasden took the hard line last year after DOE sought a waiver, which Idaho Gov. Butch Otter (R) supports, to send the spent fuel to the site despite the blown deadline. The material would have been used for DOE’s high-burnup fuel study, a decade-long investigation conducted by the Electric Power Research Institute into how such fuel affects the interior of dry cask storage containers.
