The Department of Energy is requesting more than $900 million for liquid waste treatment at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, the largest chunk of a $2.67 billion proposal for all facility operations in fiscal 2020.
That sum is the most in the DOE complex for nuclear cleanup sites. It is about $42 million more than what Savannah River is currently receiving for fiscal 2019 and $48 million more than the congressional appropriation for fiscal 2018.
The Energy Department over the last week has released its budget in brief and preliminary laboratory funding tables, outlining spending proposals for the next fiscal year, which begins on Oct. 1. However, as of deadline Friday it had not issued budget justifications that would provide program-level funding details.
At the Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C., the lab tables show a proposal of $910.9 million under the liquid waste treatment budget line item, an uptick from $875.7 million allocated for fiscal 2019 and $817.6 million for fiscal 2018.
The SRS liquid waste mission encompasses treatment of roughly 35 million gallons of Cold War-era liquid waste that is stored in more than 40 underground tanks. Salt waste accounts for the 90 percent of the volume, and sludge waste the other 10 percent.
The budget in brief states, with little detail, that money will be used to “ramp up” the liquid waste program. That includes startup of the Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF), which will work in conjunction with a longstanding pilot process to treat the salt waste stored in the tanks. The $2.3 billion SWPF was expected to start operations in December 2018, but that is now anticipated in December of this year. Regardless, it is still expected to meet the project baseline date of January 2021. “Operation of this facility will significantly increase salt treatment capacity thus enabling increased risk reduction by removing and treating the liquid waste currently in underground storage tanks,” the Energy Department stated in the budget in brief.
The increased liquid waste funding will also be used to implement 24/7 operations at the SRS Saltstone Production Facility, which mixes treated salt waste with a cement product to create a grout material suitable for permanent storage on-site. Some money will go toward the Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF), which, since 1996, has converted the site’s sludge waste into a glassy, less radioactive form. The treated material is being temporarily stored on-site while the federal government decides on a permanent repository.
Other goals under the liquid waste budget item include: continued construction of Saltstone Disposal Unit (SDU) 7, initiating construction of SDUs 8 and 9, and initiating design of SDUs 10-12. Risk management operations for liquid waste cleanup would receive $547.4 million, about $46 million more than now.
Overall, the SRS liquid waste mission is expected to last until 2039 and carries a life-cycle cost of $33 billion to $57 billion.
The 310-square-mile Savannah River Site conducts work for the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) and the agency’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). Other site missions include processing nuclear materials, such as highly enriched uranium, environmental cleanup of soil and water in and around the site, and tritium production for the U.S. Department of Defense.
Of the $2.67 billion, about $604 million will be allocated for “Weapons Activities.” Details are again vague, but $407.6 million would pay for directed stockpile work, which will likely include nuclear materials processing. Another $228 million will go toward defense environmental cleanup, which includes soil and groundwater treatment.
While liquid waste operations would get more money under the DOE proposal, funding for the Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) would be gutted. The lab received nearly $4.2 million in this fiscal year, and DOE is asking for $1.1 million in fiscal 2020 for lab activities.
That request is still more than the $841,000 the department sought for the lab fiscal 2019, before being overruled by Congress.
For defense nuclear nonproliferation, the budget in brief also lists $220 million to continue termination of the SRS Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF), which was supposed to convert 34 metric tons of weapon-usable plutonium into commercial fuel. About $5 billion was poured into the project after construction began in 2007. But the Energy Department in October terminated construction of the unfinished facility, and is now expected to dilute the plutonium at SRS and ship it to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, N.M., for permanent disposal. The budget proposal seeks $79 million to support the dilution method.
