WASHINGTON — After eight years of construction that cost nearly $1.3 billion, Parsons Government Services has finished building the Salt Waste Processing Facility at the Energy Department’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina. Now, the facility’s project manager said Wednesday, begins the really hard part.
“What we’ve experienced over the last two months is a transition from that construction phase, where we were kind of running on all guns, into the testing and commissioning phase,” Frank Sheppard, Parsons’ senior vice president and project manager for the Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF), said in a panel discussion at a Capitol Hill reception hosted by the Nuclear Energy Institute trade group. “The testing and commissioning part is something that’s extremely difficult.”
Testing and commissioning means finishing SWPF’s construction punch list — there has already been what Sheppard called a “hiccup” with a high-voltage electrical system — then moving on to testing the facility’s waste-scrubbing mechanics with water and a simulated waste. There are 300 workers on the job for this phase of the project, down from about 900 when construction was in full swing. If all goes well, SWPF will begin radioactive operations Dec. 3, 2018, Sheppard said in a brief interview after his prepared remarks.
That is three years later, give or take, than the regulatory deadline in the Federal Facilities Agreement between DOE, the state of South Carolina, and the Environmental Protection Agency that governs SRS cleanup.
But considering the funding that was available and the technical snafus along the way, late 2018 “is about the best we can do,” Jim Folk, DOE assistant manager for waste disposition at SRS, told the SRS Citizens Advisory Board’s Waste Management committee in Tuesday meeting held about 15 miles from the newly completed SWPF.
That means, eventually, DOE will have to renegotiate its agreement with South Carolina and EPA.
“That’s probably coming, but there are other things on the forefront before I would feel comfortable really having that discussion in detail,” Folk said at the Tuesday meeting in Aiken County, S.C. He added that DOE would be best able to negotiate new milestones with the state after the agency brings on a new liquid-waste cleanup prime at SRS. That will happen in 2017, after Savannah River Remediation’s contract runs out.
Folk also wants to see what comes out of a competition to procure a commercial salt-waste treatment system known as Tank Closure Cesium Removal. Savannah River Remediation is leading that procurement. The company has had proposals for that fixed-price contract in hand since January, a spokesperson said Thursday.
A spokesperson for the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control did not immediately reply to a request for comment Friday. The state and the agency began talks about missed salt waste deadlines in November, and discussions were ongoing as recently as April. So far, South Carolina has held off on imposing penalties of $105,000 a day, which could be retroactive as far back as 2011.
Also up for renegotiation is Parsons’ $1.7-billion SWPF prime contract. Awarded in 2002, the deal is scheduled to expire Dec. 31 — about two years before the company is supposed to hand over a working plant to whoever wins the follow-on to Savannah River Remediation’s contract.
“We’re going to renegotiate the balance of the contract with DOE,” Sheppard told Weapons Complex Monitor. “We expect that to happen within the next two months and establish another target cost and target schedule for achievement of startup of the facility.”
The follow-on SRS liquid waste prime cleanup contract, separate from Parsons’ SWPF deal, will be worth about $6-billion over 10 years, including a two-year option period.
SWPF is designed to process some 95 million gallons of salt waste at the Savannah River Site through 2027, at an annual rate of 9 million gallons a year — maybe as much as 15 to 18 million gallons a year, Sheppard said, once the plant begins using a next-generation solvent that has already been tested at SRS’ current salt waste processor, the smaller-scale Actinide Removal Process and Modular Caustic Side Solvent Extraction Unit. The smaller facility, billed as a pilot facility to SWPF, can process roughly 1 million gallons of salt waste a year.
Both plants are designed to separate highly radioactive cesium and actinide waste from the salt solution piped in from the SRS tank farms. Resulting salt waste gets mixed with grout and turned into so-called saltstone for on-site disposal, while the cesium and actinide waste are mixed with glass at the SRS Defense Waste Processing Facility for eventual shipment to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.
DOE officials at Savannah River have said more conservatively SWPF would treat 6 million or 7 million gallons a year.
The rightward slippage of SWPF remains in evidence on Parsons’ own website, according to which the facility was supposed to be built by early 2013 and operational by July 2014.
Driving the slip was a lack of funding from Congress, design changes pushed by DOE, and a Parsons subcontractor that failed to deliver 10 large mixing vessels for the project on time. Parsons fired the subcontractor and got the vessels from another vendor, but not in time to make the start date specified in a DOE baseline published in 2009. The department subsequently in 2014 approved a new SWPF project baseline, which raised the facility’s total project cost by about $1 billion to some $2.3 billion.
Parsons nailed the new deadline and then some, declaring its work on SWPF complete in April — eight months before the Dec. 31 date DOE set in the 2014 rebaseline. The agency took about a month to confirm the claim, and about another month before making the major milestone public in a Wednesday press release.
The importance of SWPF to the second-largest legacy-defense liquid-waste cleanup in the U.S. is not easily overstated. The site’s H-Area and F-Area tank farms contain some 30 million gallons of liquid waste leftover from decades of weapons-grade nuclear refining that began during the Cold War and ended in 2002.
At the Tuesday meeting of the SRS Citizens Advisory Board, Pete Hill, system planning manager for Savannah River Remediation, called SWPF “the most important cog in the liquid waste machine.”
Sheppard and his crew have another name for it: “the beast.” And Sheppard was unequivocal in his estimation that the beast would roar to life in 2018.
“It will operate perfectly,” the nuclear veteran told an audience of lawmakers, industry colleagues, and beltway insiders. “Above the requirements for the contract.”
