The long-delayed Integrated Waste Treatment Unit at the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory should start heating up before New Year’s and begin its cleanup mission in January, state and federal agencies said Wednesday.
The Integrated Waste Treatment Unit (IWTU), designed to convert 900,000 gallons of high-level sodium bearing radioactive waste into a granular form, “has completed all prerequisites and initiated the plant start-up process,” a DOE spokesperson said by email.
“Crews are currently finalizing their readiness for radiological operations and completing equipment maintenance/testing following the outage,” the DOE spokesperson said. The facility has been in an extended outage after concluding a 65-day test run in late July.
“The plant is scheduled to be at normal operating temperature and pressure before the end of the calendar year,” the DOE spokesperson said.
A spokesperson for the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality said the heat-up starts mid-December and the process should take about 10 days. A system performance test, using only simulant, is scheduled for Jan. 4-8.
The Jacobs-led DOE cleanup contractor, Idaho Environmental Coalition, will then gradually start introducing increasing levels of radioactive waste to the simulant, officials have said.
It has taken a long time for the project to reach this point.
Ten years ago, a CH2M-led contractor finished building the IWTU but it never worked as planned. The next Idaho cleanup prime contractor, Fluor Idaho, spent years re-engineering and overhauling the plant. Fluor Idaho also conducted encouraging short tests with simulant before turning the project over to a Jacobs-led contractor in January.
The IWTU will use fluidized bed steam-reforming technology to treat sodium-bearing waste remaining from spent fuel reprocessing at the Idaho National Laboratory. The granular form is easier to store, ship and dispose of, according to DOE.
This fall, DOE asked the state for six more months, until March 31, to fill its first canister of sodium-bearing waste and until June 30 to crank out its first 100.
