A pair of steel canisters that were not perfectly sealed after they were filled with glass-immobilized waste have been tucked away at the Savannah River Site’s Defense Waste Processing Facility Glass Waste Storage Building, according to a report posted online recently by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board.
As of Aug. 18, the canisters remained in the Glass Waste Storage Building, Savannah River Remediation spokeswoman Colleen Hart wrote in an Aug. 18 email, but “there are no safety concerns with these canisters [and] no release of radioactive material occurred.”
The canisters failed what Savannah River Remediation calls a leak check: a procedure to verify whether something might leak into the container, rather than whether waste inside the container might leak out.
While the contractor performed the leak checks correctly and even noted the canisters’ potentially permeable condition, no one marked the canisters themselves as leaky, according to a report prepared by DNSFB staff after a site visit the week of July 18. DNFSB posted the report online Aug. 12.
Savannah River Remediation acknowledged the mistake, which the contractor blamed on operating procedures that have since been revised, according to the DNFSB report.
The canisters contain solidified waste that comes from the site’s liquid waste tank farms, which themselves hold the byproducts of Cold War plutonium refining and post Cold-War chemical separations treatments. This waste, too radioactive for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, is stored on site at Savannah River, nominally for an interim period.
