The Energy Department has given its blessing for operations to start at the long-awaited Salt Waste Processing Facility (SPFF) at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
In a press release Aug. 18, the DOE Office of Environmental Management announced issuance of critical decision 4 (CD-4) and authorization to operate. The CD-4 basically means a project meets the technical criteria for success and may start the transition into actual operations.
The facility to treat 35 million gallons of radioactive waste currently held in 43 underground tanks “will drive significant progress in treating the tank waste at SRS in the next decade,” DOE Senior Adviser for Environmental Management William (Ike) White said in the release.
In 2002, Parsons signed a $2.3 billion contract to design and build the 140,000-square-foot facility to treat salt waste left over from Cold War nuclear-weapon operations at Savannah River. The cost range envisioned at the outset extended from $693 million to $2.6 billion.
The company basically finished construction in June 2016, which had DOE and Parsons eyeing a December 2018 startup. But valve replacements and other technical hitches delayed operation by more than a year.
Along the way, DOE made some claims of project mismanagement, which Parsons rejected.
The Energy Department in April 2018 claimed Parsons had underperformed in key areas of the contract, including personnel management, safety and regulatory protocol, and properly correcting its errors. Parsons Senior Vice President and SWPF Project Manager Frank Sheppard said in a reply letter to DOE that while problems existed, the agency’s assertions were inaccurate and did not properly depict the situation.
As recently as early March, the Energy Department and Parson said startup should commence this spring. In late March, however, DOE cut back to skeleton staffing at Savannah River and most other cleanup sites in an effort to stem the spread of novel coronavirus 2019 among workers.
In respective press releases, both Parsons and DOE stressed the SWPF will still be operational before the January 2021 deadline agreed to in the contract.
The SWPF should start normal operations later this year after completion of hot commissioning, DOE said in its release. As a result, nearly all of the salt waste inventory at Savannah River should be processed by 2030, according to the department.
Now that Parsons has finished building the facility, it will run the plant for the first year of operation before handing it over to the liquid waste contractor, currently Amentum-led Savannah River Remediation.
“The innovations of SWPF will forever change how we remediate nuclear waste and ensure that a cleaner, more sustainable and environmentally sensitive world is possible for the future,” Parsons CEO Chuck Harrington said in the company press release.
The SWPF will separate highly radioactive waste—such as cesium, strontium, and actinides—from the less radioactive salt solution. To do this the facility will the SWPF will use the same technologies piloted at the Interim Salt Processing facilities’ Actinide Removal Process and Modular Caustic-Side Solvent Unit (ARP/MCU) at Savannah River.
Salt waste accounts for over 90% of the material in the site’s remaining high-level waste tanks.
Separating the salt is a big step toward emptying the tanks. The decontaminated salt solution will be mixed with cement-like grout at the nearby Saltstone Facility for on-site disposal.
