The Salt Waste Processing Facility at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina has treated over 991,000 gallons of waste so far in fiscal 2022, a Department of Energy official told the Citizens Advisory Board for the site Monday.
“We just recently completed a planned outage,” July 12 at the Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF), said Michael Budney, head of operations for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management at the Savannah River Site.
If the very recent processing rate at SWPF is maintained over 12 months it would amount to 4 million gallons annually, Budney indicated.
The SWPF, built by Parsons and run by BWX Technologies-led Savannah River Mission Completion, is central to DOE plans for emptying tanks of 35 million gallons of radioactive waste at SRS over the next decade. The pace of the ramp-up is behind DOE’s earlier hopes of hitting 6 million gallons annually in the early years.
“We had this issue of material clogging some of the filters we have in that system,” and the contractor is trying to “sort out that chemistry issue,” Budney said.
The plant divides salt waste into two disposal streams. High-level radionuclides are removed and sent to the Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF) to be vitrified into a solid glass form, while the decontaminated salt solution is pumped to the nearby Saltstone Disposal Facility to be permanently dispositioned onsite. The DWPF is in a two-month outage that should be completed this month, Budney added.
Savannah River is in the advanced stages of construction of Saltstone Disposal Units 8 and 9, the latest of several mega-units designed to hold 32 million gallons of grouted saltstone. The site has DOE approval to start construction of SDUs 10, 11 and 12, Budney said.
Budney had no update to provide on the status of the management and operations contract held by Fluor-led Savannah River Nuclear Solutions. A request for proposals for a new contract was indefinitely postponed in November 2021 as Environmental Management and the National Nuclear Security Administration discuss future work at Savannah River. Savannah River Nuclear Solutions is scheduled to stay on through at least September of this year.
