The Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site is seeking approval from agency headquarters to redirect money not needed for salt waste work toward other liquid waste missions.
The DOE facility in South Carolina, like the rest of the federal government, is currently being funded at fiscal 2016-enacted levels under a budgetary continuing resolution that expires on April 28, Department of Energy SRS Manager Jack Craig noted in a recent site update to the Savannah River Site Citizens Advisory Board (CAB). In the budget year that ended on Sept. 30, 2016, the site’s Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF) received $194 million – an uptick from the $135 million it received the previous year. SWPF does not require the extra funding, as construction was completed last June. Now the focus is on less costly testing and commissioning activities, which are expected to be completed before the facility is expected to become operational late next year.
Officials at SRS did not respond to inquiries on how much funding SWPF is currently receiving, the total amount of money the site intends to reprogram, or when it expects to learn if the request has been approved.
Once operational, the Salt Waste Processing Facility is expected to increase SRS liquid waste processing from 1.5 million gallons a year to 6 million by ramping up the processing of the salt waste stored in more than 40 waste tanks on site. All told, SRS is home to just under 35 million gallons of radioactive waste, a byproduct of Cold War nuclear weapons production.
Savannah River is also receiving unneeded dollars for Saltstone Disposal Unit 6 (SDU 6) – the first 30-million gallon, megavolume salt waste disposal concrete unit constructed at the site. Once complete, it will be a permanent disposal space for saltstone, a low-radioactive salt waste found in the SRS storage tanks. The site received $35 million for the unit in the last fiscal year, and only requested $7 million for the current year as the final construction is expected to require significantly less money.
The CR is providing the previous year’s levels of funding for both facilities, prompting SRS to submit a reprogramming request “to re-align FY17 funding to cover priority work scope within SRS nuclear materials and liquid waste operations.”
Specifically, according to Craig’s update, SRS would use the extra money to process spent nuclear fuel and plutonium, and remove plutonium from on-site storage facilities. The money would also provide additional support for the SRS liquid waste program, including integrating SWPF by connecting the facility to the tank farms and the Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF), which processes the sludge waste stored in the waste tanks.
The added funding would help meet the terms of multiple agreements, including a federal-state Federal Facility Agreement (FFA) commitment for bulk waste removal from SRS. That program handles the majority of the sludge waste in the SRS waste tanks and prepares the material for treatment.
