Expedited spent fuel removal is underway at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina, now that the agency has decided not to recover high-enriched uranium from the L-Basin storage area, a manager told a federal advisory board Tuesday.
“We just kept recovering and kept recovering … and we did not have a customer here to take that uranium,” Jeffrey Bentley, senior program manager for nuclear materials stabilization, told the Savannah River Site Citizens Advisory Board meeting carried via youtube.
In April DOE approved plans to conventionally process spent fuel left in L-Basin through H-Canyon without uranium recovery.
The change should speed up disposal of spent fuel at Savannah River to the 2030s from the 2050s, utilize the site’s elaborate liquid waste system that could cease operations by the late 2030s and eliminate the need for an expensive dry storage facility, Bentley said.
There are no “hard changes” happening at H canyon, Bentley said. No major equipment is being removed, so uranium recovery could always resume at some point.
“Should the country decide, ‘hey we want to change directions and go back to recovering uranium,’” nothing will prevent that, Bentley said. Some systems are being “laid up” but not taken away, he said.
“The process has started, the first discard of liquid waste” into Savannah River’s liquid waste system will occur in January, Bentley said.
The 1950s-era H-Canyon is a chemical separation facility. Since the 1990s it has been used to dissolve spent nuclear fuel from research reactors both foreign and from domestic universities, such as the University of Missouri and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, according to a presentation from contractor Matt Arnold of contractor Savannah River Nuclear Solutions.
There are ongoing conversations between DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, the Office of Nuclear Energy and other entities about what to do with the spent fuel from the research reactors starting in the 2040s, said Michael Budney, manager of DOE’s cleanup office at Savannah River.
