Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) said last week he favors increasing funding for the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina by more than $51 million above the Donald Trump administration’s fiscal 2021 budget request, mostly to finance improvements at the H Canyon complex.
Wilson noted that H Canyon is the only hardened nuclear chemical separations plant operating in the United States. The facility has been underfunded in recent years, the lawmaker said during the House Appropriations Committee’s June 23 “member day” meeting.
“With hundreds of metric tons of low-enrichment uranium yet to be processed through H Canyon it is critical to accelerate operations,” said Wilson, whose district includes the Savannah River Site. The congressman said $45 million of the total should go to the line item that includes H Canyon.
The version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) passed out of the House Armed Services Committee late Wednesday does allow $40 million over the White House budget request for H Canyon operations, Wilson said in a press release. But the money will have to come from congressional appropriators.
H Canyon began operating in the 1950s to recover uranium and neptunium from fuel tubes used in nuclear reactors at the Savannah River Site, to make materials used in production of nuclear weapons. After the Cold War, its mission changed to focus on nonproliferation, including converting weapon-usable highly enriched uranium into proliferation-resistant low-enriched uranium, according to DOE material.
The nuclear material stabilization and disposition budget at SRS, which includes H Canyon, would decrease from $361 million in fiscal 2020 to $317 million under the president’s request for the budget year beginning Oct. 1. H Canyon’s budget does not have an individual line item.
The Energy Department in total wants $1.53 billion for environmental work at Savannah River. This includes opening of the Salt Waste Processing Facility that will separate low-activity radioactive waste from high-activity waste.
The low-enriched uranium can be used to make fuel for nuclear power plants. Since March 2003, more than 330 trailers of LEU have been sent to Tennessee Valley Authority power reactors. The program has ended and TVA will no longer receive any more of the low-enriched fuel from DOE, a TVA spokesperson said by email Wednesday.
A new process, called accelerated basin de-inventory, is being tested to replace the current downblend mission, according to an online SRS fact sheet on H Canyon. This process would dissolve spent fuel in H Canyon and then discard it as waste instead of further processing. The Energy Department believes the process would yield significant life-cycle cost savings.
Meanwhile, SRS operations contractor Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS) said last week it has completed placing the HB Line facility in a safe shutdown status, which should avoid roughly $40 million a year in costs for DOE starting in 2021. HB Line is a chemical processing facility located at the top of H Canyon.
In the mid-to-late 1990s, HB Line was used to supply NASA with plutonium-238 to fuel the Cassini mission to Saturn. As recently as 2014 it was used to make plutonium oxide, a non-weapons version of plutonium with nuclear power plant applications, according to DOE material.
Wilson also wants another $6 million added to the SRS budget for other purposes, including community support, such as payment in lieu of taxes for localities around the Savannah River Site. Localities surrounding federal installations often receive such government payments to compensate for economic development revenue if the land were privately owned.
Funds for such payments are also included in the House Armed Services NDAA, Wilson said. The full House at deadline had not yet set its schedule to consider the $740 billion bill.
Wilson is a member of the House Armed Services Committee, which has authorization power over defense environmental spending levels at Savannah River and other nuclear cleanup sites under the DOE Office of Environmental Management.
