The environmental cleanup contractor at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina told a federal nuclear safety panel recently it now has only 50% confidence of substantially finishing liquid radioactive waste cleanup at the site by 2037.
That’s the bottom line of a Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) staff report dated Sept. 13 and posted onto the board’s website this week.
Senior managers from BWXT-led Savannah River Mission Completion recently briefed the DNFSB’s resident inspector for Savannah River and “indicated a 50% confidence level in the models used to project this completion date,” according to the DNFSB report. Amentum and Fluor are also partners in the cleanup team.
Among the complicating factors is that a disposal plan for Tank 48 at H-Tank Farms, “which has unique benzene concerns, needs to be developed,” according to the report.
The cleanup contractor has changed the system plan “to more aggressively remove curies from waste tanks, resulting in cumulative curie removal during the last 2 years equaling the cumulative removal during the previous 8 years,” the report said.
Last year, DOE, the state and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency agreed to a milestone where the liquid waste work would be mostly done by 2037.
