After a warm up period, the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit at the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory last week resumed a 50-day final trial run of the plant expected to treat about 900,000 gallons of liquid sodium-bearing waste, federal and state agencies confirmed Tuesday.
Despite a brief hiccup in the latest practice run, the demo of the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit has been chugging along for about two weeks, seeming to shrug off a rocky start before New Year’s including a nitrogen supply chain issue that could be resolved by generating that gas on site, a DOE official said this week.
On Feb. 17 operators of the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit (IWTU) resumed the test run, Kim Custer, a senior hazardous waste permit writer with the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality, said via email. Likewise, the DOE Office of Environmental Management announced resumption of the demonstration that runs non-radioactive waste simulant through the facility to mimic operation with radioactive waste.
There was also a partial shutdown down on Wednesday but the demonstration run was to resume on Thursday, Joel Case, Idaho-based program director with DOE, told the Citizens Advisory Board for the Idaho Cleanup Project Thursday. “We are about 14 days into a 50-day run,” Case said.
Provided things go without a hitch, the demonstration run should be completed by the end of March, based on Case’s timeline.
The simulant run got off to a rocky start in December and was suspended Jan. 6 because of problems with delivery of adequate amounts of nitrogen to the plant that will use team-reforming technology to convert liquid sodium-bearing waste into a granular form for eventual disposal.
The IWTU uses “truckloads” of nitrogen from Linde, an industrial gas supplier in Salt Lake City, Case told the advisory board. The January disruption was due to a confluence of factors, ranging from supply chain issues, the omicron variant and some “communication issues” with the contractor, Case said.
To avoid such disruptions in the future, DOE is moving forward with plans for a “skid-mounted” nitrogen plant onsite at Idaho, Case said.
DOE and the cleanup contractor “are in the early stages of internal discussion and evaluation regarding an onsite, gaseous nitrogen generation capability which would complement our onsite, liquid nitrogen storage system,” a DOE spokesperson said by email Friday.
For the rest of the run, Jacobs-led contractor Idaho Environmental Coalition will evaluate performance of new ceramic filters and other facets of the long-delayed facility.
Following a radiological readiness assessment and inspection of filters, DOE’s Office of Environmental Management headquarters will issue its authorization for radioactive waste operations. The radwaste operations will start gradually with sodium-bearing waste introduced into the simulant mix, DOE officials told the advisory board.
The original contractor for the plant, CH2M-WG Idaho, finished initial construction of IWTU in 2012. But the facility never worked as designed to treat the sodium waste left over from nuclear fuel reprocessing at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL).
The next cleanup contractor at INL, Fluor Idaho, spent years re-engineering and making changes to key parts of the plant. Fluor Idaho did several earlier system tests of the plant in recent years before turning the facility over to the new contractor in January.
Over the years, the construction and engineering cost of the plant has mushroomed from $570 million to more than $1 billion, according to a September 2019 Government Accountability Office report. The DOE Office of Environmental Management says processing 100 waste canisters at IWTU is a priority for 2022.
