Kenneth Fletcher
WC Monitor
10/10/2014
As the Department of Energy seeks milestone extensions for Savannah River high level waste tanks, liquid waste contractor Savannah River Remediation is “optimistic” that it can close the next tank by its milestone date. The Department is entering dispute resolution with South Carolina on its request to extend the closure dates for Tanks 12 and 16 for 15 months beyond the September 2015 milestone agreed upon with the state. However, the contractor is working hard to regain the schedule for those tanks, SRR President Stuart MacVean, who took over as head of the company in August, told WC Monitor. “We’ve got Tank 16 and Tank 12 both moving at a crisp pace. We’ve saved from an efficiency standpoint and plowed savings into Tank 16 to the extent that we are now looking at being within a month of its target completion date and continue to push that schedule to the left,” he said this week. “I’m very optimistic that we’ll close Tank 16 and meet the state Federal Facilities Agreement commitment on time.”
Tank 12 has “further to go” and is still about six months behind schedule, MacVean said. “It was running about a year late on its closure schedule and we’ve got about half of that back at this stage of the game.” However, full recovery of that schedule is unlikely, MacVean said. “I think we’ll continue to improve the schedule. I’m not convinced that we’ll be able to recover all of it. We continue to work with the Department and the regulators to make the process that we are going through at this point in the game as efficient as we can. That’s all looking very optimistic,” he said.
DOE Requests 15-Month Extension
Citing technical and funding issues, in August DOE requested an extension of the closure dates for Tanks 12H and 16H from September 2015 to December 2016. However, the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control stated that it did not believe any technical issues were cause for extension, and stated that DOE did not make timely efforts to obtain necessary funds. SCDHEC only agreed to a 27-day extension to make up for last year’s government shutdown. The delays in closure of those two tanks are just the first in a string of tank closure delays DOE has attributed to a combination of a lack of funding and a change in schedule for the startup of the Salt Waste Processing Facility, among other factors. Enacted funding for the Savannah River liquid waste program stood at $838.5 million in Fiscal Year 2013, but has dropped down to a current level of $690.5 million. DOE’s FY’15 budget requests $722.8 million for the liquid waste program. Meanwhile, SWPF is expected to greatly increase tank processing rates, but has had its startup pushed back from 2014 to 2018.
In an effort to regain schedule, SRR has implemented integrated priority and lean manufacturing techniques, which are used to search for ways to prioritize work and efficiently move workers from one project to the next. Savings are then used to accelerate future work that has been prioritized. At the tank farms, workers were moved in sequence from Tanks 5 and 6, which were closed last year, to 12 and 16. “The focus on the tank closures and the efficiencies that we are getting from the lean management techniques are starting to prove fruitful from a tank closure standpoint,” MacVean said.
The technical issues cited by DOE in the extension request date back a few years and are now “all behind us,” MacVean said. “We were progressing through a chemical cleaning evolution of the tank. It was one of the few tanks where the decision was made to go through an oxalic acid cleaning evolution. The technical challenge that everyone refers to is related to mercury and corrosion of materials of construction within the tank system that we wanted to make sure that we carefully managed to make sure we maintained full structural integrity of the systems that supported Tank 12,” he explained. “The cleaning evolution was very successful and didn’t result in any harm and damage of the tank and we finished that a few years ago.”
Initial Deployment of New Solvent Successful
SRR is also experiencing “huge success” with the initial deployment of a new solvent used to process tank waste that has the potential to greatly increase tank processing rates. The contractor first deployed the Next Generation Solvent starting last December through the spring and was used to increase cesium extraction. “It’s been a real success story,” MacVean said. “It allowed us to achieve removal rates within the system considerably higher than anybody was originally thinking.”
The contractor is hoping to soon introduce the new solvent into its interim waste processing capability with a target of increasing waste processing, which MacVean says has the potential to increase throughput by as much as 50 percent. However, a new filtration capacity must first be installed. “We’re doing the background work around filtration, how to improve filtration, because that’s the next bottleneck we need to break through,” MacVean said. “We’ve got quite a bit of time and energy going into understanding that filtration and what it will take to make a step change.” SRR is considering installing rotary microfilters to make that change. “We are in the middle of a filtration evaluation as we speak. I expect them to have an answer by the end of October and at that point we would make a recommendation to the Department for decisionmaking.”
