The Salt Waste Processing Facility at the Savannah River Site, offline since late October for a combination of an operational outage and technical safety concerns, could get back up by the end of this month, a Department of Energy spokesperson said Monday.
The facility near Aiken, S.C remained in an outage early this week, following a series of procedural and record-keeping errors in the wake of October’s hard shutdown, which was first reported by the independent Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board.
The errors, violations of the site’s technical safety requirements, prompted Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF) to enter a “compliance focus period” in late November, restricting activities at the facility “ to those that are necessary for life safety, required surveillances, and low risk work released with manager approval,” the Defense Board said.
Parsons, which built SWPF and was to operate it briefly before turning the keys over to liquid waste contractor Savannah River Mission Completion in late March, was as of this week assessing the events of last autumn and working on corrective actions.
Meanwhile, SWPF was in December placed under a management control plan that required most work at the facility to be done under the supervision of senior supervisors.
The management control plan remained in effect this week “with additional reviews, enhanced management oversight and additional training and coaching being provided to the operations staff,” the DOE spokesperson told the Exchange Monitor. “Required maintenance and surveillances have also been performed during this time.”
Despite the infractions, the spokesperson told the Monitor in December that “at no time were conditions actually unsafe” at the plant. SWPF is a critical part of the system designed to clean up the site’s plutonium-production byproducts and other liquid waste.
The compliance focus period at SWPF was in part the consequence of what DOE and the Defense Board have essentially characterized as a record-keeping violation.
In late November, a shift manager at the plant noticed that somebody allowed SWPF to operate without checking into an out-of-spec flow-rate reading recorded that month at the system’s solvent drain tank. According to DNFSB, this may have been because whoever wrote down the anomalous reading did not circle it in red ink as required.
Parsons subsequently reviewed the anomaly and other system data and found that SWPF was, overall, performing as expected, the DOE spokesperson said.
The SWPF has processed 2.4 million gallons of salt since the start of hot operations in October 2020, and Parsons will complete transfer of the SWPF facility to BWX Technologies-led Savannah River Mission Completion by March 27, 2022, according to the DOE spokesperson. The plant is central to the agency’s plans to empty radioactive waste tanks at the federal complex over the next decade.
