Kenneth Fletcher
WC Monitor
1/17/2014
The Savannah River Site is conducting a “site-wide integrated assessment” after an unusual cold snap last week shut down the site’s biomass plant and associated steam lines, resulting in the shutdown of numerous facilities across the site. While the Ameresco Biomass Cogeneration Facility is back up and running, the site is still working to restart other systems, hoping to have them all back in service by the end of next week, according to Jim Giusti, a spokesman for the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Operations Office. “Our contractors are identifying lessons learned and integrating corrective actions to reduce potential vulnerabilities to our systems during future extreme cold weather events,” Giusti said in a written response.
Facilities across the site relying on the steam lines in the F, H and S areas were impacted by the outage, and some still must be fully restarted. “All of our facilities were brought down to a safe configuration while we waited to figure out how we were going to get steam back,” Giusti told WC Monitor. In addition to the biomass plant, some of those site facilities were also damaged by the cold temperatures. Giusti emphasized that biomass plant contractor Ameresco and site management-and-operations contractor Savannah River Nuclear Solutions “did an outstanding job of bringing us back up.”
DOE does not believe at this point that the shutdown was a result of human error. “We’ve seen nothing that attributes it to anything beyond the weather causing the biomass plant to shut down and weather impact on individual systems. Is there a human error in there? I don’t think so at this point. But that’s part of what the assessment is going to tell us,” Giusti said. He said in a statement, “Savannah River Site is conducting a site-wide integrated assessment into the steam outage and cold weather impacts on SRS systems and facilities from the Polar Arctic event. DOE-SR is monitoring contractor’s corrective actions and will assess the effectiveness of actions implemented to prevent recurrence of these adverse impacts. DOE-SR is monitoring contractor’s corrective actions and will assess the effectiveness of actions implemented to prevent recurrence of these adverse impacts.”
‘Unusual Weather Event’
Giusti stressed that such cold weather is a rare occurrence at Savannah River. “Let’s remember this was an unusual weather event, this is the South,” he said. In a written response, he noted, “To put this event in perspective, Savannah River National Laboratory weather data shows a cold weather event with night temperature 12 degrees or less and the afternoon high below freezing, i.e. an extended period of freezing conditions, occurs an average of roughly once in 10 years over the 50 year record, although the occurrence has been much less frequent over the last 25 years.”
