Cleanup Project head highlights successes for LINE Commission

"Ahead of schedule." That's just three words but it's a safe bet they'd never previously been uttered in relation to the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit.

The facility, which has long been a stick in the spokes of the 1995 Settlement Agreement, is finally living up to its promise. Connie Flohr, the U.S. Department of Energy's outgoing manager of the Idaho Cleanup Project, is confident enough in its performance that she expects IWTU to meet its next milestone early. 

But Flohr, who made that prediction at the Jan. 31 Leadership In Nuclear Energy Commission meeting at the Idaho State Capitol, wouldn't give a date because "then you'll hold me to it."

The 1995 agreement between the state, U.S. Navy and the U.S. Department of Energy set guidelines for removing all stored nuclear waste from Idaho by 2035 in exchange for the right to store spent nuclear fuel at Idaho National Laboratory.

The billion-dollar-plus IWTU facility, which 2006 estimates said would cost $461 million, was supposed to have gone into service in 2012 to treat 900,000 gallons of liquid radioactive waste at the DOE's desert site west of Idaho Falls. However, it didn't become operational until April 2023.

But it ramped up relatively quickly. By September it had processed more than 68,000 gallons of sodium-bearing radioactive liquid waste and filled 140 canisters with the treated waste, which represents 8% of the total to be treated, before experiencing an outage. The outage was necessitated by the need to replace the granular activated carbon bed, which absorbs mercury in the off-gas system.

The Idaho Environmental Coalition, the contractor for the Idaho Cleanup Project, took advantage of the outage to perform "hundreds of things" maintenance-wise "that can only be performed during an outage" to improve the plant's operation, Flohr said. 

The outage ended Jan. 20 and operators have begun the process of preheating the granular activated carbon bed, something that wasn't done in advance of the initial run but should make it run better, to prepare to resume radiological operations by the end of March.

The 140 canisters exceeded a 100-canister milestone specified by a 2019 Supplemental Agreement with the state and allowed Idaho National Laboratory, the nation’s nuclear energy laboratory, to receive a shipment of used next-generation light water reactor fuel. The fuel was shipped from the Byron Generating Station in Illinois, a commercial nuclear power plant, and will be used to support research and testing. It was the first such shipment in two decades, an INL news release said. 

Spent fuel shipments to INL had been on hold since a 2011 agreement with the state put in place waste treatment performance milestones that had to be met before any such shipments could be received.

Lance Lacroix, manager of the Idaho Operations Office for the Office of Nuclear Energy, spoke alongside Flohr at the LINE Commission meeting and called the spent-fuel shipment a game-changer for the lab.

He said it's important for the lab to have the Byron fuel, because for the next seven years the lab will be able to use that fuel to do various types of research.

"This thing's going to facilitate just more and more work," he said.

INL Director John Wagner agreed with Lacroix, adding that the research will be "very, very meaningful work for the nuclear energy industry."

Wagner also offered praise to the DOE, Gov. Brad Little, Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador and others involved in the process to overcome the block on spent-fuel shipments.

"I'm so pleased to see how people came together to first do the technical accomplishments that were needed and then in terms of how to represent that," Wagner said.

"I feel like a lot great progress in terms of relationships."

The next metric for IWTU to achieve is to treat at least 15% of the sodium-bearing waste this year.

"Based on current processing projections and time that we think we're going to get back up resuming operations from this (outage), we actually think we'll meet that 15% requirement early," Flohr said.

The successes with IWTU weren't the only ones Flohr highlighted.

Other high notes included:

• Progress in reducing the transuranic waste inventory at the Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project;
• The July demolition of the Accelerated Retrieval Project V facility, with facilities VII, VIII and IX scheduled for removal by December; 
• And decommissioning the Naval Reactors Facility’s A1W prototype reactor facility.

In just over a year's time cleanup contractor Idaho Environmental Coalition reduced the overall transuranic waste inventory at AMWTP by 22%, or 9,331 waste containers. It sent more transuranic waste shipments to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico in calendar year 2023 than at any point over the last decade, a release said.

"In order to do this (the) team has to move 10,000 drums a month in order to cherry pick the very specific drums that are needed to create all those waste shipments," Flohr said.

The Idaho Cleanup Project took possession of the A1W prototype, in 2023, four years ahead of schedule — there's those words again — and since much of its material wasn't contaminated, crews to date have been able to recycle more than 340 tons of steel, brass, copper and lead that otherwise would have had to be buried in on-site landfills. The recycling effort which was proposed and led by Idaho Environmental Coalition staff helped the project save money and landfill space.

Much praise for those accomplishments was directed toward Flohr, who spent four years as the Idaho Cleanup Project manager and helped lead the effort to to finally make IWTU operational as well as to simultaneously spearhead other cleanup projects.

But Flohr was quick to credit a host of partners, including Idaho Environmental Coalition President and Program Manager Ty Blackford.

Commission member Brady Hall, legal counsel for the Office of the Governor, recalled a meeting from a few years back in which Gov. Brad Little "very tersely" told Flohr to "get IWTU up and running — and you've done it."

Hall said Flohr's successor will have big shoes to fill.

Commission member Brian Wonderlich, general counsel for Blue Cross of Idaho, praised Flohr for her presentations, past and present, and asked if the successes highlighted in her final one made it the best one yet.

"That's quite a way to go out with all those successes and really to highlight your legacy," Wonderlich said.

Flohr, her voice cracking with emotion, said the Idaho Cleanup Project job was her best one yet and said leaving was the hardest decision she'd ever made because so many good things are going on.

Blackford, also showing emotion, addressed the commission saying "You wonder how you get good things done? It's because you have good partners and Connie has been that."

Turning to Flohr, he described her as a friend and said "I'm going to miss you. Thank you."

Idaho Falls Mayor Rebecca Casper asked for the group to give Flohr a round of applause and the members enthusiastically obliged.

By Jeff Robinson | Reprinted from the Post Register Feb 24, 2024 Updated Mar 14, 2024