Liquid waste workers are filling another of the Savannah River Site’s disposal units with decontaminated salt solution.
Savannah River Remediation (SRR), the liquid waste contractor at the Department of Energy site in South Carolina, is filling Saltstone Disposal Unit (SDU) 3A, according to a Facebook post Tuesday. Work began in February.
SDUs are cylindrical concrete tanks that can hold 2.9 million gallons of waste. “SDUs are designed to permanently store low-level waste that has been mixed with a cement-like grout, reducing the risk of radioactive liquid waste stored at SRS,” the site wrote in Tuesday’s post.
The most recent SRS Liquid Waste System Plan projects the unit will be filled by February 2018.
Six of the seven SDUs at the Savannah River Site are operational, and four of them are filled. The seventh, SDU 6, is expected to be available in May; it is also the site’s first mega-volume salt waste disposal unit, with a capacity of 32 million gallons. The department expects to need nine of the mega-volume SDUS, according to the Liquid Waste System Plan.
Prior to permanent disposal, the salt waste is extracted from the storage tanks that hold about 35 million gallons of radioactive liquid waste, a byproduct of Cold War nuclear weapons production at SRS. Roughly 90 percent of the total waste volume is salt waste. The Department of Energy ultimately intends to remove all the waste from the tanks and process it on-site to remove its environmental threat.
