Perma-Fix Environmental Services, Inc. announced that Veolia Nuclear Services’ (VNS) new 10-tonne GeoMelt In-Container Vitrification (ICV) plant, cooperatively installed and operated by Perma-Fix at the Perma-Fix Northwest (PFNW) facility in Richland, Washington, has successfully completed hot commissioning and its first in a series of demonstration melts for the US Department of Energy (DOE) Idaho National Laboratory (INL) to treat sodium contaminated radioactive wastes. The contract with the INL to treat the sodium contaminated wastes follows successful engineering scale demonstrations of the patented GeoMelt technology earlier in the year. The goal of the engineering scale testing was to confirm the ability of the GeoMelt® technology to create a safer treatment approach that lowers the lifecycle cost to disposition radioactive contaminated reactive metal waste streams resulting from decommissioning sodium cooled reactors. The demonstration, supported by glass formulation and crucible testing, consisted of a series of bench scale ICV™ melts that processed elemental sodium into a stable non-reactive form. The objective of the new INL contract, awarded in September to VNS Federal Services LLC (VNSFS), is to demonstrate at full-scale the treatment capabilities of the GeoMelt® technology by chemically converting the reactive metals to an inert oxide, thereby delisting the sodium hazard in the waste and immobilizing and stabilizing the radioactive contamination. Under the agreement, Perma-Fix and VNS (www.nuclearsolutions.veolia.com) will treat the drums contaminated with radioactive sodium wastes. The Fermi Drums were received at INL in the 1980s. They were contaminated with low-level radioactively contaminated elemental sodium from the Enrico Fermi Atomic Power Plant and have been maintained at INL for decades. However, as a credit to the partnership with INL, the maturity of the technology and an aggressive construction schedule, the team successfully completed the first melt of 55 drums of radioactive contaminated sodium wastes on December 20, 2018.