The Department of Energy and Parsons Corp. have finished hot commissioning of the Salt Waste Processing Facility at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
Parsons, which designed and built the 140,000-square-foot plant to treat salt waste left over from Cold War era nuclear weapons work, will run the facility for a year before turning over operations to the liquid waste contractor, Savannah River Remediation in January 2022.
The completion of hot commissioning, a process that began in October and involves verifying that the plant can process radioactive waste, was announced by DOE in a press release this week.
The Parsons hot commissioning period ended up being “very close to the planned schedule of approximately 90 days,” a DOE spokesperson at Savannah River said by email Thursday.
After starting off with small, diluted batches, the facility had processed 320,000 gallons of radioactive liquid waste at the H Tank Farm at Savannah River, DOE said this week.
There are roughly 36 million gallons of tank waste at Savannah River and the Salt Waste Processing Facility is meant to treat more than 90% of that waste by separating out the most radioactive elements —such as cesium, strontium, and actinides — from the less radioactive salt solution. Decontaminated salt solution will be mixed with grout at the nearby Saltstone Facility for on-site disposal.
After the separation process is completed, the concentrated high-activity waste is sent to the nearby Defense Waste Processing Facility.
There are currently 43 tanks left holding roughly 33 million gallons in the form of salt waste, the DOE spokesperson said.
“The start of operations enables DOE to now close waste tanks at an unprecedented rate,” Mike Budney, Office of Environmental Management’s Savannah River operation office manager, said in this week’s press release.
The DOE and Parsons expect the facility to process up to six million gallons of waste during the first year of operations, which would translate to up to 500,000 gallons monthly. Production rates will vary due to the various planned and unplanned outages for facilities in the Savannah River liquid waste system, the DOE Savannah River spokesperson said this week.
The DOE expects SWPF will process nearly all the salt waste by 2030.
In August, DOE greenlighted the start of radioactive operations at SWPF, then dedicated the facility in a ceremony in September.
Parsons was contracted in 2002 to build the facility under a cost range between $693 million to $2.6 billion. The current cost is $2.3 billion.
In May 2018, Parsons asked DOE to retract a notice of concern saying the agency’s changes significantly contributed to delays. Hiccups on the project started prior to 2016 due to design changes, congressional funding and a former contractor’s failure to deliver certain major components on time, Parsons has said.
