The Salt Waste Processing Facility, offline since late October at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina, should restart in a couple of weeks, an executive with Parsons Corp., which built the plant told an advisory panel Tuesday.
“We are shut down currently,” Mike Pittman, a Parsons vice president and project manager for the Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF) told the Savannah River Site Citizens Advisory Board meeting. “My plant manager assures me we should be up in a couple of weeks.”
The DOE and Parsons have been working out certain technical safety and operational issues since the late fall and Parson is also preparing to transfer operation to the new liquid waste contractor, BWX Technologies-led Savannah River Mission Completion, by March 27. The new waste contractor was set to take over non-SWPF duties from incumbent Savannah River Remediation by the end of February.
The $2.3-billion Parsons contract that started in September 2002 and runs through April, stipulated Parsons would run the plant for a full year in order to work the bugs out.
Hot commissioning of the plant, deemed central to emptying radioactive waste tanks at Savannah River over the next decade, started on Jan. 17, 2021, and thus far the plant has processed more than 2.4 million gallons of salt waste, officials said during the meeting. That’s below what Mike Budney, the top boss for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management at Savannah River called “theoretical” first-year goals of four-to-six million gallons.
Nevertheless, “Parsons has successfully designed, constructed, commissioned, started-up and is operating” the facility without either a lost-time work accident or a significant radiation or chemical exposure, Pittman said. “We showed that all the goes-intos and comes-out-ofs work,” he added.
Editor’s note, 01/26/2022, 11:06 a.m. Eastern time: the article was corrected to show that Parson’s contract is worth $2.3 billion.
