Although a drone used to probe the innards of a highly-radioactive calcine storage facility at the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory got stuck inside last month, it poses no threat to successful removal of the calcine, federal officials said recently.
“On the third flight, in which the drone attempted to collect radiological data, a down draft of cold air overcame the drone as it attempted to exit the vault at full throttle,” according to a staff report from the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) dated Dec. 2 and posted online last week.
Unable to exit, the drone rests on a bin holding calcine, which is a dried byproduct of liquid waste generated during historic spent nuclear fuel reprocessing at the laboratory’s Idaho Nuclear Technical and Engineering Center, according to DNFSB.
Calcine Disposition Project engineers are exploring how to recover the drone, “even though it is not essential for the remainder of the project,” DNFSB said.
Nevertheless, “what is believed to be the world’s first piloted drone mission inside a high-level radioactive waste storage vault,” was successful in capturing radiological and mapping details, the DOE Office of Environmental Management, said in a release last week.
Before the drone got stuck, the DOE and its Jacobs-led contractor Idaho Environmental Coalition successfully flew two missions inside a calcine bin set built during the 1960s, Environmental Management said in the release.
“Getting this data was crucial to the project safely moving forward,” said Calcine Retrieval Project engineer Kevin Young in the press release. “The mission was a huge success.”
DOE and the contractor are developing equipment to extract and remove 220 cubic meters of the granulated high-level radioactive waste from one bin set to another, according to the release.
Ultimately, a 1995 settlement agreement between the state, DOE and the U.S. Navy requires all 4,400 cubic meters of calcine from six bin sets to be removed, packaged and ready for shipment out of Idaho by 2035, DOE said.
Drone footage of the interior of the highly-radioactive area is featured in a two-minute youtube video on the mission by an Elios-3 drone.
