The Department of Energy has scrubbed its goal to restart this month the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit at Idaho National Laboratory.
“This week, while performing start-up operations at the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit (IWTU), crews identified abnormal conditions while performing testing in preparation for resuming waste processing,” DOE said in an email press release shared with Exchange Monitor Thursday morning.
As a result, the agency “has decided to conservatively suspend start-up activities and commence facility cool-down to allow time to further investigate and address the cause of the abnormal conditions.”
The outage is apt to take at least a month, in part because the plant has to cool down and in part because the plant is now handling radioactive waste, not just simulant.
The DOE statement came after agency and Jacobs-led prime managers, during a Wednesday afternoon session at the Waste Management Symposia in Phoenix, declined to list an exact restart date for the plant, adding some problems could always emerge. Contractor executive Ty Blackford and DOE’s retiring Idaho cleanup manager Connie Flohr both said that safety, not speed, is the prime consideration.
Facility start-up commenced earlier this month, following a five-month maintenance outage. During this time, IWTU engineers replaced the spent granulated activated carbon beds which remove mercury during the sodium-bearing waste treatment process.
DOE and its contractor, the Jacobs-led Idaho Environmental Coalition, continue to work on a fix and will share data with the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality.
To date, the IWTU has treated more than 68,000 gallons of waste, which represents more than 8% of the total tank farm volume. DOE has targeted output of 135,000 gallons per year to treat all 900,000 gallons. IWTU started operations in April 2023.
Sodium-bearing waste treatment is expected to take three to seven years to complete, accounting for outages to conduct regular maintenance on the facility.
