Twenty workers at the Energy Department’s Savannah River Site will swap badges to Savannah River Remediation from Parsons to ensure liquid waste treatment at the Salt Waste Processing Facility begins around 2019, as scheduled.
The AECOM-led Savannah River Remediation (SRR) “recently chose to hire 20 Radiological Protection Inspectors through Parsons, the SWPF [Salt Waste Processing Facility] contractor, to support its part of the work,” DOE and SRR stated in a joint press release Tuesday.
The personnel swap, according to the statement, “is crucial in order to keep the pre-startup work moving on schedule.”
“SWPF startup requires Radiological Protection Inspector coverage above what the current SRR workforce can support,” Keith Harp, SWFP integration project manager for Savannah River Remediation, said in the release. Prior to the announcement, Parsons had roughly 300 workers at the Salt Waste Processing Facility. The 20 now headed to SRR will eventually return to Parsons.
SRR is responsible for connecting the site’s liquid waste tank farms to the Salt Waste Processing Facility, which Parsons finished building in April. Construction began in 2009. SWPF cost about $1.3 billion to build and will cost about another $1 billion on top of that to operate through 2024. The facility is now in the commissioning phase and expected to come online in mid-December 2018.
SWPF was supposed to be online in 2015, per a regulatory deadline in the federal facilities agreement between DOE, the state of South Carolina, and the Environmental Protection Agency that governs SRS cleanup. Technical snafus delayed the project.
The facility is designed to process some 33 million gallons of liquid waste at the Savannah River Site through 2024. That is roughly 90 percent of the total volume of liquid waste in the site’s tank farms. Savannah River’s liquid waste, which comprises briny salt solution and heavier, more radioactive sludge, was created by Cold War-era plutonium production for the Pentagon’s nuclear arsenal.
The Savannah River Site did not reply to multiple requests for comment this week. Kristen Ellis, acting director of communications for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management in Washington, D.C., also did not reply to a request for comment this week.
