Liquid waste management and the first year of operations of the Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF) would consume a large chunk of the $1.7 billion proposed for Environmental Management (EM) operations in fiscal 2021 at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
At deadline Friday, DOE had not released a budget justification laying out details of the $6.3 billion Office of Environmental Management spending plan announced Monday for the budget year that begins Oct. 1. The department’s budget in brief says the $1.7 billion for Savannah River would be a $72.9 million uptick from the $1.63 million the site received in the current fiscal year for cleanup and roughly $150 million more than the $1.55 billion from 2019.
Some of that money will be used to treat liquid radioactive waste at the Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF), which converts sludge left by Cold War nuclear-weapon work into a glassy, less harmful form. The final product is placed in stainless steel canisters and stored on-site while the federal government continues work to identify a permanent repository.
The facility has filled more than 4,000 canisters since operations began in 1996. The sludge waste generated as a byproduct of nuclear materials processing at SRS during the Cold War. A dollar amount for liquid waste or related operations was not provided in the DOE budget in brief, but the agency for fiscal 2020 requested $960.98 million for liquid waste work at Savannah River.
The Defense Waste Processing Facility does not have its own line item in budget documents. Rather, it falls under the liquid waste item.
Sludge waste makes up roughly 10 percent of the 35 million gallons of waste stored in more than 40 underground tanks at the 310-square-mile site near Aiken, S.C. The rest of the volume is salt waste that was being treated using a pilot program that ended in mid-2019 to make way for the larger-scale Salt Waste Processing Facility.
The new facility is expected to begin operations by the end of the March, and the fiscal 2021 proposal will continue funding its work. In the upcoming fiscal year, the facility will begin “full year, 24/7 operations,” according to the budget in brief. The document did not state exactly when the ramp-up will begin, but it will increase overall waste processing from 1.5 million gallons per year to 7.4 million gallons.
Continued construction of Saltstone Disposal Unit 7 will continue in 2021, with completion scheduled for spring 2022. The unit is a 30-million-gallon megavolume concrete structure that will house treated salt waste. The only other unit of that size at STRS is SDU 6, which began accepting waste in October 2018.
All told, the SRS liquid waste mission is expected to last until 2039 and cost between $33 billion and $57 billion
The EM budget also calls for $25 million for the Advanced Manufacturing Collaborative facility, a 60,000-square-foot facility to be located near the University of South Carolina Aiken campus about 15 miles from Savannah River. Construction of the facility is expected to cost $50 million. The 2020 budget provided the first half of that funding. There is no timetable for the start or completion of construction. The facility will use technology to expedite the remediation mission. For example, it will develop robots that can go into waste tanks and collect waste samples for assessments. It would also use virtual technology to run simulation tests on cleanup strategies before the work is physically done.
