The contractor for the Salt Waste Processing Facility at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C. fixed a problem pump flagged by a federal watchdog, and the newly opened facility has now received 86,000 gallons of waste from the site’s H Tank Farm in its first month of radioactive operations, according to the Department of Energy.
Parsons, which built the Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF), will operate the facility for a sort of one-year break-in period starting in January. The contractor was also responsible for starting up SWPF; hot commissioning, the start of radioactive operations, was Oct. 5. Parsons will eventually turn the facility over to Savannah River Site’s liquid-waste cleanup contractor.
The Savannah River Site has about 35 million gallons of tank waste left over from decades nuclears weapons work.The SWPF is supposed to treat more than 90% of that waste by separating out the most radioactive elements of the waste.
The SWPF is meant to separate highly radioactive cesium, strontium, actinides, and waste slurry from the less-radioactive salt solution in the tank farms. SWPF will process between four to six million gallons of waste in the first full year of operations that begins in January, DOE estimates.
After startup, SWPF largely worked as expected, although one problematic pump, cited in a recent staff report by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board had to be replaced, DOE said Tuesday in a press release.
The board’s report, dated Oct. 16 and recently posted online, said the SWPF effectively removed actinides from the waste stream. But there was a hitch in the second major step, removal of cesium-137 by caustic side-solvent extraction, because of mechanical issues with the pump. DOE said this week that it replaced the pump.
As of Nov. 9, SWPF has received eight transfers totaling nearly 86,000 gallons of waste, DOE said. The first 4,000-gallon batch took about two weeks to process as DOE and Parsons checked to ensure all aspects of the process worked as designed. The first three transfers were pretty small and subsequently diluted once received at SWPF. Remaining testing during hot-commissioning will use non-diluted waste, DOE said.
After the separation process is done, SWPF sends concentrated high-activity waste to the nearby Defense Waste Processing Facility. Separately, the decontaminated salt solution is mixed with grout at the nearby Saltstone Production Facility for onsite disposal, DOE said.
