The Nuclear Regulatory Commission will prepare an updated technical review for the Saltstone Disposal Facility at the Energy Department’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
The Energy Department requested the technical review of the 2020 Saltstone Disposal Facility performance assessment in keeping with a provision of the 2005 National Defense Authorization Act, according to the NRC.
The Saltstone Disposal Facility is a 200-acre complex of saltstone disposal units. The facility includes Saltstone Vaults 1 and 4, Saltstone Disposal Units (SDUs) 2 through 5, which each hold about 3 million gallons, and eventually seven massive SDUs, numbered 6-12, which occupy 2.5 acres each and will accommodate 33 million gallons per SDU, said a DOE spokesperson.
The federal nuclear regulator has received the Energy Department’s performance assessment and should complete an “acceptance review” by Oct. 5, Patricia Holahan, director of the NRC’s Division of Decommissioning, Uranium Recovery, and Waste Programs, wrote in a July 6 letter to James Folk Jr., assistant manager for waste disposition at DOE’s Savannah River Operations Office. The acceptance review is intended to ensure the DOE document has the information needed for the NRC to conduct the full evaluation.
Upon completion of the acceptance review, a schedule will be issued for the complete NRC technical review, Holahan told Folk. The 2005 NDAA gives NRC some regulatory responsibility for land disposal of radioactive waste in Idaho and South Carolina.
The Energy Department’s 2020 performance assessment replaces a document published in 2009 that subsequently led to issuance of a “letter of concern” by the NRC as part of its technical evaluation report in 2012.
Since 2005, however, the Energy Department significantly changed the design of the saltstone disposal structures, altered its groundwater model, and made other tweaks to the document, according to the NRC. As a result, the agency is administratively closing its 2012 letter of concern.
In 2018, the Energy Department started construction of its second large-scale saltstone disposal unit at Savannah River, capable of holding 32 million gallons of nonhazardous waste produced by treating decontaminated salt waste with dry materials to make a cement-like grout. Once completed in spring 2022, Saltstone Disposal Unit 7 (SDU-7) will be 43 feet high with a diameter of 375 feet, and modeled after SDU-6 completed in July 2017, DOE has said.
SDU 7, as well as future additional SDUs, are being built to permanently store the large volume of decontaminated salt solution to be generated at the Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF) expected to come online this year. The House Appropriation Committee’s proposed energy and water development funding package for fiscal 2021 would fund construction of SDU-7 at $10.7 million, which is $29 million less than the fiscal 2020 spending level of $40 million, but equal with the White House request for the project. SDU 7, as well as future additional SDUs, are being constructed to safely and permanently store the large volume of decontaminated salt solution to be generated at the Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF) scheduled to open this year.
