The schedule for startup of the Savannah River Site’s $2.3 billion Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF) has been pushed back to early next year, following initial efforts to begin operations in December 2018 and a more recent target of December 2019.
The SWPF Operational Readiness Review should be completed by January, according to Bryce McDevitt, a spokesman for Parsons, the contractor hired in 2002 to design, build, and oversee the first year of operations for the facility. The review includes a checklist of standards necessary to ready a project or facility to start operations.
The review will allow SWPF to be safely tied into the rest of the liquid waste system at the Department of Energy facility in South Carolina. Savannah River then can “begin introduction of radioactive waste into SWPF in early 2020,” McDevitt said by email.
The 140,000-square-foot Salt Waste Processing Facility will remove cesium from the millions of gallons of radioactive salt waste currently stored in more than 40 underground, Cold War-era tanks at the 310-square-mile site near Aiken, S.C. The complex houses about 35 million gallons of liquid waste; roughly 90 percent of that by volume is salt waste and the rest is sludge waste.
Once the cesium is separated from the salt waste, it goes to a nearby facility where it is treated with the sludge waste and temporarily stored on-site as the federal government works to find a permanent repository for its high-level defense waste. The treated salt waste will be permanently stored on-site.
When Parsons completed building the SWPF in June 2016, the company and Energy Department believed it would begin operations in December 2018. But equipment issues derailed that timeline, pushing the schedule back one year.
In June 2018, following a spat between DOE and Parsons over management of the project, the two sides agreed Parsons would submit an updated baseline that includes new costs and schedules for SWPF testing and first-year operations.
“We have reached an agreement on the Realized Risk Proposal and have established adequate cost and schedule incentives to achieve startup as soon as possible and cost effectively,” McDevitt stated.
He did not provide details of the agreement.
