Supply chain slowdowns are still gumming up work at the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory, a federal safety watchdog said recently.
“General personal protective equipment such as nitrile gloves, rubber booties, Tyvek suits, respirator cartridges, and airline hoses have extended lead times up to six months,” the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) said in a staff report dated June 3, which cites a monthly cleanup progress report for the complex.
“Supply chain management forums are evaluating the feasibility for sharing critical inventories among U.S. Department of Energy sites,” according to the DNFSB report.
Also at the Idaho National Laboratory, Integrated Waste Treatment Unit has processed about 60,000 gallons of simulated waste since the Department of Energy restarted a confirmatory run of the facility on May 23, an agency spokesperson said in a Thursday email.
The conclusion of the simulant run, which was initially expected to run 50 days, will be determined by DOE and Jacobs-led contractor Idaho Environmental Coalition “based on the steady-state performance of the facility, completing required readiness assessments, and meeting specific test criterion,” the spokesperson said.
The DOE and its Idaho Cleanup Project contractor have struggled since late December to carry out a final test run of the facility designed to convert up to 900,000 gallons of sodium-bearing, radioactive waste into a stable granular material. DOE’s top cleanup manager at Idaho, Connie Flohr, told a citizens’ advisory board in April the agency has decided the demonstration run will extend as long as necessary.
Although the fluidized bed steam-reforming facility was largely constructed in 2012, it never worked as planned and has been significantly re-engineered since then.
The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management had 135 onsite cases of COVID-19 in the seven-days ended Thursday, up 20 from the 115 recorded last week, according to a spokesperson for the nuclear cleanup office.
That’s 41 more onsite cases than the 94 the Office of Environmental Management confirmed during the week ended June 2 and about five times the 23 weekly onsite cases recorded by the cleanup office nearly two months ago.
Earlier this year, an Environmental Management official said more than 100 people working on DOE nuclear cleanup projects died from COVID during the pandemic, which began in the United States in early 2020.
