The Savannah River Site in South Carolina is on pace to meet its fiscal 2017 goal to double-stack and safely store 200 canisters of treated radioactive waste, according to a site official.
In October, liquid waste contractor Savannah River Remediation (SRR) began stacking canisters of vitrified waste on top of each other in Glass Waste Storage Building 1 (GWSB 1). Before the waste is vitrified, or converted to a glass form, it poses a much bigger threat due to its high level of radioactivity.
The waste dates to nuclear weapons production at the Department of Energy facility during the Cold War. All told, SRS is home to about 35 million gallons of waste, a large portion of which must be converted and stored in these canisters.
The double-stacking initiative began in October 2016. It costs about $3 million per year and is expected to last through fiscal 2023. To advance the storage method, workers had to temporarily relocate canisters of the waste from GWSB 1 to GWSB 2 to convert the first building for double-stacking.
By double-stacking the canisters, the site is adding more space to temporarily store waste. SRR spokesman Dean Campbell said by email that, as of Monday, 129 canisters are in “double-stack” positions. “The goal to double-stack 200 canisters is on target for Fiscal Year 2017,” he wrote.
The canisters stacked in GWSB 1 are filled with waste that was processed through the SRS Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF), which takes waste and a special glass product and heats the two products to create a molten glass. The final product is a waste form suitable for long-term storage at a repository. According to a January 2017 update, DWPF has produced more than 4,100 canisters of the waste form.
