The Department of Energy confirmatory test run for the much-anticipated Integrated Waste Treatment Unit at the Idaho National Laboratory will likely end around the end of July, a state official said recently.
“The [Integrated Waste Treatment Unit] continues to run and will do so for approximately two more weeks,” Kim Custer, a senior hazardous waste permit writer with the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality, said in a June 15 email to Exchange Monitor Publications.
The DOE and Jacobs-led contractor Idaho Environmental Coalition are continuing to run the facility with a simulant under various conditions that are in the System Performance Test Plan, the state official said.
William (Ike) White, who as special adviser is the acting boss of the DOE’s $7.6-billion Office of Environmental Management, said last week the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit (ITWU) has treated more than 100,000 gallons of simulant since this test run began May 23. White also expressed optimism, after a Congressional hearing, the facility will start actual operations to treat sodium-bearing radioactive waste by the end of the year.
The fluidized bed steam-reforming facility, meant to convert about 900,000 gallons of liquid sodium-bearing waste left over from reprocessing into a more stable granular form, has a long and challenging history.
A CH2M-led contractor finished major construction in 2012 but was not able to get the facility to work as planned. The next Idaho Cleanup Contractor, Fluor Idaho, spent several years re-engineering and redoing several major parts of the plant.
In January the current contractor team led by Jacobs, which now owns CH2M, became responsible for taking the plant to operation from testing.
