The Department of Energy’s confirmatory run of its Integrated Waste Treatment Unit at the Idaho National Laboratory has been paused once for about a day since its resumption May 23, a state official said Tuesday.
The Integrated Waste Treatment Unit (IWTU) “is currently operating at steady state conditions for the Confirmatory Run,” Kim Custer, a senior hazardous waste permit writer, said via email June 14. Simulant feed rate has remained steady at 1.6 gallons per minute, Custer said.
In June there was a brief interruption in the trial run due to a rapid system shutdown due to low oxygen in the carbon reduction reformer. But after a clogged line was cleared, the simulant feed resumed the next day and has been running since then, Custer said.
Since late December, DOE and its contractor have tried to carry out a planned 50-day demonstration run of the facility meant to convert up to 900,000 gallons of sodium-bearing waste into a more stable granular material for eventual disposal.
The fluidized bed steam-reforming facility was first built in 2012 but never worked as intended and has undergone significant re-engineering over the past decade. The Jacobs-led Idaho Environmental Coalition is the third DOE contractor to attempt to bring the unit online.
The Department of Energy’s Environmental Management Consolidated Business Center is doing market research for a small business to provide litigation support to its Office of Chief Counsel.
On Thursday June 9, the Environmental Management Consolidated Business Center (EMCBC) published a Sources Sought/Request for Information (RFI) for companies to provide litigation support to its office locations in Cincinnati, Denver and perhaps elsewhere.
The DOE is “seeking interested parties with specialized capabilities” in complex litigation support involving regulation issues and related tasks including paralegal services, document management, and database management.
“It is required that the company have proficiency in document management, database management, legal research, document reviews, Federal Rules of Civil Procedure,” according to the RFI.
While said responders should meet the small business size standard of $15 million.
In September 2019, EMCBC issued a $2.8-million contract for litigation support to TLI Solutions, a subsidiary of Techlaw Holdings, a company with offices in Virginia, Colorado, New Mexico, Tennessee and elsewhere.
The Department of Energy Thursday awarded a potential five-year contract with a maximum value of $8-million to a Colorado-based small business for modeling and statistical analysis connected with remediation of the West Valley Demonstration Project in New York state.
The new contract awarded to Neptune and Company, Inc. of Lakewood, Colo., is jointly funded and managed by DOE and the New York State Energy and Research Development Authority (NYSERDA) to support Phase 2 decommissioning of the former chemical separations facility.
The Neptune website lists prior work for West Valley, the Hanford Site in Washington state, Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Nevada National Security Site. Neptune’s approach involves integrating environmental modeling, environmental statistics, risk assessment and quality assurance, according to Neptune.
The federal and state agencies share costs for cleaning up West Valley. The state-owned site sits on 200 acres inside the 3,300-acre Western New York Nuclear Service Center, where a private company, Nuclear Fuel Services, ran a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant for six years ending in 1972. CH2M-BWXT West Valley is the cleanup contractor in place since August 2011. The current remediation contract, valued at $836 million, runs through August 2024.
Plaintiffs suing current and former Department of Energy contractors at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio told a federal district court this week one of their attorneys has died.
The Cooper law firm “respectfully advises the Court that Stuart H. Smith passed away on May 20, 2022,” according to a Tuesday motion filed with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio. The motion formally asked that Smith be removed as the attorney of record for Ursula McGlone and her fellow plaintiffs who live a few miles from the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant site in Piketon, Ohio.
According to a biography on the firm’s website, the New Orleans native Smith practiced law for 32 years and built a reputation for pioneering the field of Technologically Enhanced Radioactive Material (TERM) oilfield waste litigation, toxic torts and environmental litigation. He sometimes appeared on cable news programs to discuss legal issues.
McGlone sued the current and former contractors not long after public news reports of radioactive contamination at nearby Zahn’s Corner Middle School. They allege the contractors violated government standards and failed to keep contamination contained inside the DOE’s fence line. In April the federal judge in charge of the case refused to throw out most of the claims brought by plaintiffs.
