PHOENIX — By the end of 2020, the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management expects to start operation of facilities in Idaho and South Carolina that will convert radioactive tank waste into stable forms for eventual disposal, agency officials said here Monday.
The Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF) at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit (IWTU) at the Idaho National Laboratory are both major facilities that DOE’s nuclear cleanup office has been pursuing for years.
In addition, construction of the Direct-Feed Low-Activity Waste system (DFLAW) should wrap up this year at the Waste Treatment Plant being built by Bechtel at the Hanford Site in Washington state, DOE Senior Adviser for Environmental Management William (Ike) White said in a presentation to the Waste Management Symposia. The system would convert Hanford’s low-activity waste into glass, starting by 2023.
While White has previously discussed the impending milestones in the three tank management projects, he cited them Monday as part of a annual priorities and strategic vision statement rolled out by Environmental Management.
In addition to construction projects, DOE will soon wrap up key demolition projects such as the Plutonium Finishing Plant at Hanford, the document notes. Teardown of the massive X-326 uranium enrichment process building will also get going at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio this summer, according to a bullet-point list of priorities.
A third priority will be shrinking the nuclear cleanup footprint in the near future by officially closing out remediation of the Separations Process Research Unit (SPRU) in New York, where Amentum has finished virtually all of the physical work.
Other priorities in the near term include issuance of new contracts, such as a stand-alone operations agreement for the Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina, and completion of an environmental analysis for a pilot run of the agency’s new high-level radioactive waste interpretation, which could involve shipping recycled wastewater from SRS to an out-of-state low-level waste disposal site.
