SUMMERLIN, NEV. The Department of Energy expects the integrated Waste Treatment Unit to take up to seven years to treat roughly 850,000 gallons of highly radioactive sodium-bearing liquid tank waste at the Idaho National Laboratory, an agency official said Friday.
Following the heatup that started Oct. 24, DOE and Fluor Idaho is about to commence a 50-day test run with a simulant “to verify that everything is ready to go for rad operations,” Joel Case, assistant manager for facility and material disposal at DOE’s Idaho Cleanup Project, said during a remote presentation to the Radwaste Summit, a conference sponsored annually by ExchangeMonitor Publications.
There will be a brief outage after the 50 days to physically inspect the filters, Case said.
The IWTU will use steam reforming technology to convert the sodium-bearing liquid tank waste, left over from spent fuel reprocessing, into a solid, granular form. That could take anywhere from three to seven years, Case said.
A prior contractor, CH2M-WG Idaho first built the unit in 2012 but it never worked as planned. Fluor Idaho has re-engineered and reworked certain key parts of the facility in recent years, according to DOE. A new Jacobs-led contractor, Idaho Environmental Coalition, was scheduled to take over environmental remediation at the Idaho National Lab in January.
