The Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina spends much of its infrastructure money taking care of “aging, old systems” some of which are 70 years old, an agency official told the site’s Citizens Advisory Board Monday.
David Bender, the DOE infrastructure services director at the federal complex along the Georgia state line, said 25% of the commonly used infrastructure and utility assets at Savannah River are anywhere from 51 to 70 years old. Another 36% are between 31 and 50 years old, 31% are between 15 and 30 years old and only 8% came online in the past 15 years.
The Savannah River Site is home to extensive operations for both DOE’s Office of Environmental Management and the semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).
“We are going to be here a long, long time,” and will need good roads and buildings, Bender said in his presentation to the Citizens Advisory Board. Leaving aside continuing missions, like DOE’s plans to make plutonium pits at the site, cleanup won’t be finished until 2065.
The Savannah River Site is home to five biomass energy plants, 64 miles of high-voltage power lines, 33 miles of railroad tracks and 119 miles of paved roads, Bender in his slide presentation during the meeting carried via YouTube. A year ago Tropical Storm Sally hit South Carolina causing significant damage to several buildings at the site, causing Savannah River to dip into its road maintenance budget to pay for some of the repairs, he said.
Also, in fiscal 2019, the Savannah River site studied the feasibility of building 10 megawatts of solar electric power generation onsite but found the project uneconomic without significant government subsidies, Bender said. But things change and the federal agency and the site’s power supplier, Dominion Energy, plan to take a fresh look at the issue in fiscal 2022, he added.
