Hot commissioning of the Salt Waste Processing Facility at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina is underway, the agency said this week in a press release.
On Monday afternoon, Amentum-led Savannah River Remediation, the Savannah River Site (SRS) liquid waste contractor, transferred 4,000 gallons of waste from the H Tank Farm to the Salt Waste Processing Facility, which Parsons built. It should take about 10 days to process the tank waste while surveillance and sampling is done to ensure the plant operates as designed, DOE said Tuesday.
It was “very boring just as we wanted it to be,” Frank Sheppard, Parsons senior vice president and SWPF project manager said by phone Tuesday. “We have been through many simulated transfers” before now, he said.
“We gradually start with a low-curie material,” Sheppard said, adding there would be three such mini-batches processed over the next couple of months as part of the ongoing validation procedure with DOE.
Coming into 2020, Parsons and DOE envisioned reaching the hot commissioning stage in April but the timeline was pushed back several months due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Sheppard said.
About 500 people work at the new plant. Once full production is reached at SWPF, the tank waste work at the Savannah River Site will effectively be a 24/7 operation, Sheppard said.
Full-scale operation of the plant is targeted for January or early 2021, Sheppard said
The facility will eventually process 31 million gallons of radioactive salt waste held onsite in underground tanks at the federal complex adjacent to the Georgia border. The Department of Energy hopes all of the salt waste inventory left over from Savannah River’s Cold War nuclear weapons work will be processed within 10 to 15 years.
The SWPF will separate the more highly radioactive waste — mostly cesium, strontium, actinides and waste slurry — from the less radioactive salt solution. After this initial separation, the low-volume high-activity waste will go to the nearby Defense Waste Processing Facility where it will be converted into a stable glass form and stored in vaults until it can be placed in a geological repository. The decontaminated salt solution, which is high-volume and low-activity, will be mixed with cement-like grout at the nearby saltstone facility for disposal onsite.
The technology used at the SWPF is proven, Sheppard said, because it was successfully demonstrated over a decade at Savannah River by the Actinide Removal Process and Modular Caustic Side Solvent Extraction Units.
Parsons will run the $2.3-billion, 140,000-square-foot plant during its first year of operation before passing it on to the site’s liquid waste contractor, currently Savannah River Remediation.
