Environmental Management (EM) missions at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina are in line to receive $287 million more in the next federal budget than they received in fiscal 2017, with a strong emphasis on liquid waste cleanup.
President Donald Trump’s fiscal 2019 budget proposal, released Monday, would provide $1.66 billion for Savannah River Site cleanup activities. That would provide a “significant increase in the production at the Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF) and startup of the Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF),” according to the DOE budget summary issued Monday.
The DWPF converts highly radioactive waste stored at Savannah River into a solid glass form for storage. The facility is designed to process over 30 million gallons of sludge and salt waste stored in more than 40 waste storage tanks, a byproduct of Cold War nuclear weapons production at SRS.
The Energy Department as of Thursday had not released a budget justification that would provide greater detail of planned spending at the Office of Environmental Management, which oversees cleanup at SRS and 15 other nuclear sites around the country. But in a “Budget in Brief,” the agency said funding should allow the DWPF to produce 135 to 175 canisters of treated waste in fiscal 2019. “The liquid waste tanks pose the highest public, worker, and environmental risk at the site; therefore, stabilization and preparation for disposal are a high priority,” the document says.
In 2016, SRS completed construction of the Salt Waste Processing Facility, with startup slated for December of this year. A proxy facility has been treating the salt waste in the interim, allowing the processed material to be placed in the SRS Saltstone facilities for permanent disposal. Once the SWPF comes online, waste processing is expected to jump from 1.5 million gallons per year to 6 million. The proxy facility alone is expected to treat 200,000 gallons of the salt waste in fiscal 2019.
The site’s Saltstone Disposal Unit 7 (SDU 7) is slated for completion in fiscal 2019, according to the Budget in Brief. The 32-million-gallon concrete structure will be a permanent disposal unit for the treated salt waste found in the storage tanks. SRS broke ground on the unit earlier this month. Construction of SDUs 8 and 9 is also expected to begin in the next fiscal year.
Other operations due for funding in fiscal 2019 include: maintenance of H Canyon, the facility that processes nuclear materials; secure storage of spent nuclear fuel; and increased support of the site’s double-stacking project, which increases space in the waste storage facilities by safely stacking canisters on top of each other.
Liquid waste treatment and tank closures have been the budget priority at SRS for years. The site received $712 million in fiscal 2015, $784 million in fiscal 2016, and about $766 million through fiscal 2017. So far through more than four months of fiscal 2018, Congress has kept the federal government running by a series of short-term budgets that have largely frozen spending levels at prior-year levels.
The Energy Department reported in 2015 that the anticipated completion of liquid waste cleanup at Savannah River had been pushed back from 2042 to 2065, with the cost surging to $25 billion more than the original estimate. New cost projections reported at the time were between $91 billion and $109 billion.
