Broken pumps that transfer sludge waste from the Savannah River Site’s (SRS) Defense Waste Processing Facility back into the site’s H Area Tank Farm are being replaced with used pumps from the site’s F Area Tank Farm, the Energy Department and prime SRS liquid waste cleanup contractor Savannah River Remediation (SRR) announced Wednesday.
The joint press release said the replacement pumps, which “mixed waste in Tank 7 in F Tank Farm for years,” would be installed at H Area Tank Farm “soon.” The replacement pumps are still being reassembled at Tank 22, which collects liquid from the Defense Waste Processing Facility. The facility turns liquid waste from the tank farms into more easily storable radioactive glass in a process known as vitrification. However, not all the waste is vitrified in its first trip through DWPF, resulting in a so-called recycle stream that is collected into Tank 22.
DOE and its contractor pegged the cost of a new pump at about $1 million in the release, and hailed the swap as a money-saver.
“The overall effort required several man-months and there was no increase in cost to the program,” a spokesperson for Savannah River Remediation wrote in a Thursday email.
The original pumps at Tank 22 were installed in the late 1980s and failed near the end of their design life in 2014, the contractor spokesperson said. DOE and Savannah River Remediation decided to move the Tank 7 pumps into Tank 22 in 2015. Workers started removing the pumps from Tank 7 in October 2015. The pumps are slated to go into service at Tank 22 in August, the spokesperson said.
The broken Tank 22 pumps will be disposed of at SRS’ burial ground, the contractor spokesperson said.
The SRS tank farms contain about 36 million gallons liquid waste left over from Cold War-era nuclear weapons programs.
