Yesterday, I blogged about a dispute between the Idaho Attorney General and the U.S. Department of Energy over permission to ship spent nuclear fuel to the Idaho National Laboratory. The AG was upset because the DoE had fail to comply with a Settlement Agreement involving the construction and operation the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit at the INL. Today, I am going to talk about the IWTU.
The INL is a nine hundred square mile facility in eastern Idaho near Idaho Falls. It currently employs over eight thousand people. It was created in 1949 as the National Reactor Testing Station. After a few changes in federal agencies, operators and names, it became the Idaho National Laboratory when the Battelle Energy Alliance took over management from Bechtel. The INL has been working on the development of nuclear reactor technology and handling of nuclear waste since its creation. Nuclear non-proliferation is also one of its areas of work. Now it is also working on ways of protecting civil infrastructure from physical and cyber attacks. Other areas of interests include biofuels, robotics, advanced vehicles, hybrid energy systems and other scientific pursuits.
In 1995, the State of Idaho and the DoE signed a Settlement Agreement that required the DoE to construct a treatment facility that would take care of nine hundred thousand gallons of liquid radioactive waste at the INL. The Integrated Waste Treatment Unit is a test project for treating the liquid radioactive and hazardous waste that have been stored in underground storage tanks for decades. The waste that will be treated is called sodium-bearing waste. It was generated during spent nuclear fuel reprocessing from the 1950s up to 1992. The liquid was transferred to three three hundred thousand gallon storage tanks that are a part of a tank farm at INL. The IWTU will use a steam reforming technology to heat up the liquid waste which will essentially dry it. Any emissions generated by the process will be filtered though HEPA filters to meet state and federal air quality requirements. The granular solid material produced will be consolidated and the packed in stainless steel canisters. The containers will be stored in concrete vaults onsite. Finally, the canisters will be transported to a permanent geological repository when one has been constructed.
The DoE promised to have the IWTU operating by 2012. It is now 2015 and the IWTU is still not operating. The DoE has said that it may be functional by September this year but skeptics point out that there is testing going on right now in late August that may take several months to complete.
The INL is just one of many federal facilities around the U.S. which were left with radioactive waste in solid and liquid form from the Cold War production of nuclear warheads and the production and reprocessing of nuclear fuel from commercial power reactors. The U.S. government should divert some of the hundreds of billions of dollars from the defense budget to cleaning up the radioactive mess they have left for decades.
Integrated Waste Treatment Unit:
