The Integrated Waste Treatment Unit is again solidifying sodium-bearing liquid waste at the Idaho National Laboratory, a Department of Energy spokesperson said Thursday in an email.
“During maintenance, engineers replaced granulated activated carbon beds, which remove mercury during the waste treatment process, replaced process gas filter bundles, and completed minor maintenance operations,” the spokesperson wrote in an email to the Exchange Monitor.
DOE and its Jacobs-led contractor Idaho Environmental Coalition were hoping to restart the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit (IWTU) in March, but technical snafus foiled that plan. In June, the agency and its contractor said broken ceramic filter elements were to blame for the delay.
IWTU started operations in April 2023 after long developmental delays and will take between three and seven years to solidify all 900,000 gallons of sodium-bearing waste, “accounting for outages to conduct regular maintenance on the facility,” the spokesperson wrote in the email.
The waste is leftover from spent fuel reprocessing that ended in the early 1990s.
Construction of the IWTU was completed in 2012 but the facility never worked as intended. Fluor Idaho, and subsequently the current prime, spent more than a decade getting the facility online, at a cost of about $1.4-billion.