One leak-plugging effort is underway at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site (SRS), and another did not quite work out as planned, the agency’s prime liquid waste cleanup contractor at the facility near Aiken, S.C., told a DOE-chartered citizens group late Tuesday.
Both leaks could hamper DOE’s goal to process and store this year 1.5 million gallons of the low radioactive saltstone waste distilled from SRS liquid waste.
The plugging that just began is for the 30-million-gallon Saltstone Disposal Unit 6: a tank based on a commercial design for storing water and other liquids, which failed a leak test in April. DOE is trying out a series of six different liners, Pete Hill, an executive with Savannah River Remediation, told the Waste Management Committee of the SRS Citizens Advisory Group.
Hill said he had “no idea” Tuesday night what the liners are made of, but said the first one contractor is trying is about 3/16 of an inch thick. Hill had “no timeline” yet for when the leak tests are supposed to be complete. DOE told the full board on May 27 the tank should be ready next March, about five months later than expected but more than a year before the agency expects to need it in 2018.
Meanwhile, Hill said, the cracked 3-H evaporator pot, one of two active pots at SRS that help distill liquid waste into salt waste, is still leaking. Engineers late last month tried to locate the crack with a dye they thought would coat the damaged parts of the pot and highlight the problem areas, but that did not work, Hill said. He added SRR would try the same test again, hoping for better results.
These kinks in salt waste processing cropped up the same day DOE announced that Parsons had completed construction of the Salt Waste Processing Facility at SRS, which now is slated to begin radioactive waste treatment in December 2018 — three years later than planned. An interim salt waste treatment plant on site will process 15 million gallons of salt waste this year, DOE hopes. The permanent Salt Waste Processing Facility just completed is expected to process 9 million gallons a year, according to the department.
