The on-again, off-again demonstration run of the Department of Energy’s Integrated Waste Treatment Unit at the Idaho National Laboratory should be on again in June, according to a federal nuclear-safety overseer.
After an outage during March and April, the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit (IWTU) was to begin heating up in early May, according to a recently released staff report from the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB), dated May 6.
After two weeks of heat-up, the IWTU could again resume processing a simulant liquid meant to mimic sodium-bearing high-level radioactive waste, according to the one-page DNFSB report. “The tentative start date for the Contractor Readiness Assessment for Radiological Operations is mid-to-late June,” the board said.
The DOE has been trying to carry out a planned 50-day demonstration run of the facility, designed to convert about 900,000 gallons of sodium-bearing waste into a more stable granular material, since late December. But the effort has been bedeviled by factors including human errors, lining up reliable nitrogen supplies and re-examining components.
As a result, in April, Connie Flohr, DOE’s manager of the Idaho Cleanup Project, told a citizens advisory board that the agency and its contractor, Jacobs-led Idaho Environmental Coalition, would be restarting the demonstration run from scratch.
Flohr also said the demo run with simulant would not necessarily end at 50 days but would extend as long as it takes for the feds to feel comfortable that the plant can run continuously for long stretches.
First constructed in 2012 by a contractor team headed by CH2M, now part of Jacobs, the IWTU never worked as planned. Fluor Idaho, the immediate past environmental contractor, spent years reengineering and tweaking much of the plant and doing other shorter test runs. Idaho Environmental Coalition took over the Idaho Cleanup Project in January.
The DOE has been mum in recent weeks about when the demonstration run might resume.
