Kenneth Fletcher
WC Monitor
8/29/2014
The Department of Energy expects budget constraints to restrict the amount of high-level waste that can be transferred from Savannah River’s H-Canyon to the site’s tank farms, potentially impacting future missions for the facility. DOE informed M&O contractor Savannah River Nuclear Solutions that it will be limited to transferring 50,000 gallons of high-level waste from H-Canyon to H-Tank Farms this fiscal year, 150,000 gallons next year, and then 105,000 gallons each year between 2016 and 2019, according to a recently posted July 25 Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board staff report. “While SRNS has been trying to reduce the volume of waste they transfer, these volumes will likely impact the amount of spent nuclear fuel, plutonium, and enriched uranium that can be processed,” the report states.
DOE requested $260 million in Fiscal Year 2015 for nuclear material stabilization and disposition at Savannah River, compared to $272 million in enacted funding in FY’14. Operations of the facility were on pause for much of the first half of this year while SRNS made necessary system upgrades. At this point SRNS is poised to launch several new missions at the facility, including plutonium oxide production and a multi-year effort to process used fuel in the site’s L-Basin. H-Canyon recently completed a campaign to dissolve 147 bundles of Sodium Reactor Experiment used nuclear fuel for disposition in the site’s Defense Waste Processing Facility. Additionally, H-Canyon is looking to process highly enriched uranium from Canada beginning late next year, and is being considered for a potential effort to process HEU from Germany. DOE did not respond to request for comment this week on the potential impact of the tank farm limits on new missions.
SRS Watch: Plans For Foreign Waste ‘Likely Killed’
However, the advocacy group Savannah River Site Watch saw the report as a sign that DOE may back away from the new efforts. “It is unavoidable that plans to turn SRS into a processing facility for foreign nuclear waste will be impacted and likely killed,” Tom Clements of SRS Watch said in a statement. “This situation with H-Canyon underscores that SRS must not be turned into a facility for either storage or processing of foreign nuclear waste as that would negatively impact both on-going cleanup activities and result in more waste being dumped at the site. H-Canyon must not be turned into a profit-making facility for contractors as is being eyed with the deals with Canada and Germany and instead must remain solely focused on cleanup of existing SRS nuclear materials.”
