Despite fanfare over the plant’s official completion last week, South Carolina has not forgotten the Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF) at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site is now projected to start radioactive waste treatment three years later than mandated, and remains in talks with the agency over the repercussions of the blown deadline.
“The Department of Energy has missed a number of deadlines and continues to ask for extensions associated with the startup of the Salt Waste Processing Facility at the Savannah River Site,” a spokesperson for the state’s Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC) wrote in a late-Friday email. “The deadlines are important to managing critical risk reduction for South Carolina. DHEC has been working with DOE to address these deficiencies, but to date, the issues are unresolved. DHEC is seeking commitments from DOE for robust waste treatment to make up for ongoing project delays.”
DOE announced last week its prime contractor on SWPF, Parsons Government Services, beat the construction deadline the agency established in a 2014 baseline that raised the cost of the facility by about $1 billion to an estimated $2.3 billion. However, the rebaseline pushed the start of waste operations out to Dec. 3, 2018, roughly three years later than the federal facilities agreement that DOE, South Carolina, and the Environmental Protection Agency signed to govern cleanup of the former weapons-material production site.
So far, South Carolina has held off on imposing penalties of $105,000 a day for the missed deadlines, which could be retroactive as far back as 2011. These include certain SWPF construction milestones.
SWPF is designed to treat 95 million gallons of salt waste distilled from the liquid waste in Savannah River Site’s tank farms. The facility cost about $1.3 billion to build over eight years and can, according to Parsons, process 9 million gallons of waste a year. The current salt waste treatment system at Savannah River, the Actinide Removal Process and Modular Caustic Side Solvent Extraction Unit, can process roughly 1 million gallons a year.
