The Department of Energy will indeed start later this month to heat up a facility to eventually convert 900,000 gallons of radioactive sodium-bearing liquid waste at the Idaho National Laboratory into a more stable form for disposal, an agency spokesperson said Thursday.
Actual operation of the long-delayed Integrated Waste Treatment Unit (IWTU) will occur early in the new year, the DOE spokesperson said via email. “DOE remains committed to the safe start-up and operation of the IWTU,” the spokesperson said. “Ensuring protection of the workers, the public, the environment, and the underlying Snake River Plain aquifer is our foremost priority as we complete heat up this year and prepare for hot operations in early calendar year 2023.”
A representative of the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality said last month DOE and its Jacobs-led contractor will start off using a non-radioactive simulant liquid, then gradually add in the sodium-bearing waste left over from reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel.
The Civilian Board of Contract Appeals will not reconsider an August ruling against Leidos-led Mission Support Alliance regarding payments to subcontractors by the former landlord contractor at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state.
The board had found Leidos-led joint venture failed to adequately justify the $334,000 it paid to three subcontractors, according to an Oct. 20 decision. The contracts appeals board did agree, however, its earlier decision against Mission Support Alliance should be tweaked.
“Rather than ‘no’ evidence of cost reasonableness, it could be more accurate to say that [Mission Support Alliance] cited weak or unpersuasive evidence.” Another Leidos-led contractor team, Hanford Mission Integration Solutions, took over site services in August 2020 under a $4.1-billion contract expected to run at least through August 2025.
Work crews have completed construction of a protective cocoon around another old plutonium production reactor at the Hanford Site in Washington state, the Department of Energy said recently.
The steel structure around the K East Reactor is more than 120 feet tall and 150 feet wide, the DOE Office of Environmental Management said in an Oct. 26 press release. Construction of this latest cocoon started roughly a year ago and should secure the structure while the radioactivity in the deactivated reactor core decays over decades, before the facility is ultimately disposed of.
Amentum-led Central Plateau Cleanup Company awarded two construction subcontracts worth about $9.5 million to Richland-based DGR Grant Construction in August 2021. The K East Reactor ran from 1955 to 1971 as Hanford produced plutonium for the United States nuclear weapons program. It becomes the seventh of Hanford’s nine former reactors to be cocooned, according to DOE.
