Lance Moore
WC Monitor
7/31/2015
Completion of the Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF) at the Savannah River Site is well ahead of schedule, according to Parsons Corp., the Department of Energy contractor tasked with making the SWPF fully operational. The company expects to finish work ahead of the mandated deadline of Dec. 31, 2016. The budget for the project has been set at $530 million.
"We’ve implemented a number of strategies to safely and efficiently accelerate the schedule," Parsons SWPF Project Manager Frank Sheppard said in an emailed statement this week. "Our focus on safety as well as the emphasis we’ve placed on aligning our engineering, construction, and commissioning groups has really put us in a position to succeed. We are working closely with our DOE customer to deliver this project earlier than the Department’s baseline date of January 2021 and get the facility up and running so that it can perform its vital mission in cleaning up the Savannah River Site tank waste."
Parsons also aims to produce a state-of-the-art facility to process 31 million gallons of radioactive salt waste in storage at the nuclear site. "Make no mistake: our goal is not to simply deliver a facility, but rather to successfully complete testing and commissioning of the facility and begin radioactive waste operations," Sheppard said. "That’s really our focus as we deliver this first-of-a-kind facility that will efficiently process salt waste at the Savannah River Site."
