While the Department of Energy is still gunning for a fall start of radiological operations, agency officials acknowledged this week they are not sure how long a final test run might take for the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit at the Idaho National Laboratory.
When asked by a Citizens Advisory Board member for the Idaho Cleanup Project, DOE official Trent Neville said the current timeline envisions startup of radioactive operations in September or October.
But due to the “fits-and-starts” so far with demonstration of the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit (IWTU) the agency now expects the trial run to last beyond the previously scheduled 50 days, DOE officials said Tuesday.
“There really is no such thing as a 50-day run anymore,” Connie Flohr, DOE’s manager of the Idaho Cleanup Project, told the Citizens Advisory Board during a hybrid meeting. The agency wants to ensure the IWTU can run continuously with a non-radioactive simulant before receiving radioactive waste — something that will notionally happen later this year.
“It might be 75 days, it might be 90 days, it might be 100 days,” Flohr said. Flohr added she and Ty Blackford, program manager for Jacobs-led contractor Idaho Environmental Coalition, want to be sure the facility can run continuously for long periods without unplanned outages.
Flohr made her remarks after another DOE official, Trent Neville, who used the “fits and starts” analogy, told a board questioner that the demonstration run will basically start from scratch within a couple of weeks or so.
“We are basically starting back over.” Neville said the demonstration run could well exceed the originally planned 50 days.
“We have never shut this plant down on our own accord” to date, Flohr said.
Neville said that of the two shutdowns since late February, one was an automatic shutdown triggered by a human error and the other was a more-vexing “de-fluidization,” which has triggered weeks of inspections, cleaning and disassembly of components inside the IWTU.
“Some of these issues we have encountered are going to be incredibly problematic” if they happen with real radioactive waste, Flohr said. As a result, an extended run is needed until DOE and the contractor “feel comfortable” with the performance.
After spending a total of about 20 days running with simulated radwaste since late December, the demonstration run was paused Feb. 26 after swings in operating temperatures and gas concentrations within the unit, DOE has said.
Upgrades are being made to the unit to provide earlier warning of potential bed de-fluidization, Neville said. Also procedures are being tweaked to direct controlled shutdown sooner, he added.
IWTU is designed to convert between 850,000 and 900,000 gallons of sodium-bearing liquid waste into a more stable granular form for eventual disposal.
Idaho Environmental Coalition is the third contractor team to try bringing IWTU online. The facility was first built in 2012 by a contractor team headed by CH2M, now part of Jacobs, but the unit never worked as planned. Fluor Idaho, the immediate past prime, spent many years reengineering much of the plant and doing other shorter test runs. Idaho Environmental Coalition took over the Idaho Cleanup Project in January.
