With maintenance almost complete, the Department of Energy expects to restart operations of an Idaho National Laboratory treatment facility for radioactive sodium-bearing waste early in 2024.
Workers for DOE ‘s Jacobs-led environmental cleanup contractor have replaced mercury-laden beds of granular activated carbon in two vessels of the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit (IWTU), which has been offline since September. The carbon removes mercury from liquid radioactive waste left over from spent fuel reprocessing that ended in the early 1990s.
The plant should resume converting the liquid, sodium-bearing waste into solid grains “early next year,” the DOE Office of Environmental Management said in a Monday statement. It will probably be late January, a DOE spokesperson said in an email reply to Exchange Monitor.
Contractor Idaho Environmental Coalition used a special vacuum to remove the spent carbon. Other components are also being replaced during the outage. Such maintenance is necessary from time-to-time, although DOE has said the carbon replacement outage came sooner than expected.
Since starting radioactive waste operations in April, the IWTU has treated 68,000 gallons of waste from underground tanks. That is out of a total of about 900,000 gallons left over from nuclear reprocessing at the Idaho National Laboratory.
The steam reforming plant, which started operations only this year after being in the works since 2007, is powered by coal.
