Despite delays in startup, the Savannah River Site’s $2.3 billion Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF) is meeting all of its safety and functionality requirements, with no suggested areas of improvement, according to a new review from the U.S. Department of Energy.
The DOE Office of Enterprise Assessments (EA) on Tuesday released five reports on safety issues within agency sites and missions. One of those covered the Salt Waste Processing Facility, which will convert radioactive salt waste into a form suitable for permanent storage at the DOE site near Aiken, S.C.
In a seven-page assessment, EA summarized how mandatory safety documents for the facility matched up against DOE guidelines for such documents. It covered the SWPF documented safety analysis, which evaluates potential hazards during design, construction, operation, and eventual cleanup; the technical safety requirements document (TSR), covering standards that ensure facilities operate properly and within acceptable limits; and its safety evaluation report (SER), which provides a summary of information often found in the two other documents.
The review was conducted from September 2017 through October 2018.
“The assessment encompassed specific aspects of the DSA, TSR, SER, supporting hazard analysis, and supporting engineering documents. EA also examined the safety functions, functional classifications, functional requirements, performance criteria, and TSR controls for certain safety structures, systems, and components (SSCs) and specific administrative controls,” the report says.
The SWPF documents were all found to be in good standing, according to the assessment. There is “reasonable assurance of adequate protection of workers, the public, and the environment from adverse consequences, considering the work to be performed and the associated hazards,” EA said.
Parsons was hired in 2002 to design, build, test, and start up the facility by January 2021. The plant is expected to process roughly 30 million gallons of salt waste. Parsons will operate the SWPF for a year before turning it over to the site’s liquid waste management contractor. That one year of operations has a target cost of $86.3 million.
The contractor and DOE were pushing for a December 2018 startup after construction was completed in June 2016. But various issues, from technological setbacks to Parsons’ work performance, have pushed the projected beginning of operations to December of this year.
