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.
In late November, the facility near Aiken, S.C., was already in an outage to do cleanup and recovery of internal process chemicals, the DOE spokesperson wrote in a Monday email. In addition, a weekly Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board staff report dated Dec. 10 said DOE has sent a “letter of concern” to contractor Parsons over a series of technical safety requirement violations outlined in November reports from the board.
“Additionally, Parsons is initiating a Management Control Plan that will require all work to be performed under Senior Supervisory Watch,” according to the DNFSB document.
The management control plan remains in effect “with additional reviews, enhanced management oversight and additional training and coaching being provided to the operations staff,” the DOE spokesperson said. “Required maintenance and surveillances have also been performed during this time.”
Generally speaking, safety violations cited in DNFSB staff reports dating to November were previously characterized by the DOE spokesperson as recordkeeping infractions.
“[A]t no time were conditions actually unsafe” at the plant, a key cog in the system that cleans up the site’s plutonium-production byproducts and other liquid waste, an agency spokesperson said in a December email to Weapons Complex Morning Briefing.
The week of Thanksgiving, the Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF), built by Parsons, was mostly shut down for a Technical Safety Requirements (TSR) “Compliance focus period,” DNFSB said in a staff report dated Nov. 26.
At that point, work on the system was “mainly restricted to those that are necessary for life safety, required surveillances, and low risk work released with manager approval,” according to the board’s report.
The shutdown happened after a shift manager at Savannah River noticed that somebody allowed SWPF to operate without checking out an out-of-spec flow-rate reading recorded before the holiday 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 anomalous reading and other system data and found that SWPF was, overall, performing as expected, the DOE spokesperson said.
