The Department of Energy and the contractor that built the Salt Waste Processing Facility are preparing to restart the plant deemed central to emptying radioactive waste tanks at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, a spokesperson said Friday.
“The efforts to remove the particulates from the process chemicals have been completed and the facility is going through preparations for restart,” a DOE spokesperson said by email Friday without elaborating.
On Jan. 25, Parsons vice president and project manager for SWPF Mike Pittman, told the Savannah River Site (SRS) Citizens Advisory Board to expect the plant back in service within a couple of weeks. That would translate to roughly about now.
Parsons’ $2.3-billion contract to design, build and commission SWPF, an agreement which began in September 2002, will expire April 30. Before then, on March 27, Parsons will hand over the keys to the new SRS liquid waste contractor, the BWX Technologies-led Savannah River Mission Completion.
The contract required Parsons to run the plant for a full year to work the early kinks out. While the plant has only processed 2.4 million gallons of salt waste in the first year — well below early DOE targets of four-to-six-million gallons — Pittman said the important thing is the plant works.
“We showed that all the goes-intos and comes-out-ofs work,” Pittman told the advisory board.
A blend of technical safety concerns and operational bugs have kept the facility offline since late October.
Michael Budney, the DOE Office of Environmental Management’s top boss at SRS, said in November SWPF should be able to process 43 tanks containing high-level waste by 2033, slightly further out than an earlier 2031 goal. The SWPF’s annual output should accelerate by fiscal 2024 thanks to deployment of a “next generation solvent,” Budney said in an online presentation to the Exchange Monitor’s Radwaste Summit in Nevada.
The SWPF separates highly radioactive contaminants, such as cesium and strontium, from the less radioactive salt solution from the tanks. Downstream of SWPF, the highly-radioactive material is converted into a stable glass form at Savannah River’s Defense Waste Processing Facility. The salt solution coming out of SWPF is sent to above-ground saltstone disposal units at the site.
