A new project baseline proposal for the Savannah River Site’s Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF) was recently submitted by Parsons and is currently under review by the U.S. Department of Energy, an agency spokesperson confirmed this week in an email.
Parsons submitted the plan last month. The Department of Energy (DOE) spokesperson said SWPF will still be operational well before January 2021, as outlined in project’s baseline.
Up until a few months ago, Parsons and DOE were pushing to bring SWPF online by December 2018. The facility is expected to treat millions of gallons of highly radioactive salt waste stored in more than 40 underground waste tanks at the Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C. The baseline approved in 2014 called for Parsons to carry out construction, design, testing, and startup of the facility by January 2021 at a total cost of $2.3 billion, not including one year of operations by the contractor.
But an April 7 notice of concern, sent from the DOE office at Savannah River to SWPF Project Manager Frank Sheppard, requested a new project baseline amid the federal agency’s frustrations with Parsons’ safety culture and overall work performance at the facility. The notice highlighted several personnel and safety concerns, and requested the company submit a “return to green” plan for resolving those issues.
Sheppard responded on April 6, writing that Parsons’ role in issues with SWPF had been mis-characterized and that some of the problems cited in the original letter stem from DOE deviating from the contract. For example, DOE limited the amount of work Parsons could perform while implementing a corrective action plan for hazardous energy control, then took longer than the allotted 30 days to review the plan, Sheppard wrote.
The Salt Waste Processing Facility is expected to be a key part of the liquid waste processing mission at Savannah River. The site houses roughly 35 million gallons of highly radioactive liquid waste that is a byproduct of Cold War weapons production. About 90 percent of that is salt waste and the rest is sludge waste.
