The Department of Energy now expects the Salt Waste Processing Facility built by Parsons at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina will treat roughly four million gallons, rather than six million gallons, during its first full year of operation, an agency official told the state Nuclear Advisory Council Monday.
Parsons finished hot commissioning of the Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF) in January — testing it out with radioactive material — and the unit has since treated more than 2.1 million gallons of liquid radioactive waste, Thomas Johnson, deputy director of Savannah River Site operations for the DOE Office of Environmental Management, told the panel.
While DOE talked earlier this year about “being able to process up to six million gallons in its first year,” the agency and Parsons now want to ensure “everything is working according to plan,” before accelerating throughput, Johnson said.
The Environmental Management executive did not elaborate but also said some of the infrastructure that feeds the waste to SWPF is also being upgraded. The 140,000-square-foot plant was offline for about 40 days this spring after a mechanical failure of coalescer equipment used to separate liquids. The SWPF, which is central to DOE plans to close the site’s remaining 43 high-level waste tanks, had processed 1-million gallons of tank waste by July.
By volume, SWPF is expected to treat 90% of the tank waste, left over from decades of Savannah River nuclear weapons work, by separating highly radioactive elements including cesium and strontium from the less radioactive salt solution. The concentrated high-activity waste is then transferred to the site’s Defense Waste Processing Facility, which converts waste into a solid glass form.
Parsons has a contract that began in September 2002 to design, build, commission and operate for one year the SWPF. That contract, set to expire in April 2022, is now worth $2.3-billion. After the first full year of operation, Parsons will hand over the plant to the liquid waste contractor, currently Amentum-led Savannah River Remediation, which will then assume operation of the plant.
Johnson also told the advisory panel construction of Saltwaste Disposal Unit (SDU) 7 was completed in July and is available to start taking decontaminated salt solution resulting from liquid waste treatment at the Salt Waste Processing Facility when needed. The DOE has previously said it could put SDU 7 into operation next spring. Like SDU-6 before it, and the SDU-8 under construction, SDU-7 is 43 feet tall and 375 feet in diameter with a 33-million-gallon capacity.
