Testing and commissioning of the Savannah River Site’s Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF) is 36 percent complete, and the plant remains on pace to start-up by December 2018, an Energy Department official said this week. Following more than a year of high-stakes negotiations starting in September 2015, the Energy Department and the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control (SCDHEC) came to terms on Nov. 1 on how to handle missed SWPF deadlines. Those terms included the state agency temporarily waiving its authority to fine the Energy Department upward of $195 million.
DOE-SR spokeswoman Soni Blanco spoke briefly about SWPF progress Tuesday during a meeting of the SRS Citizens Advisory Board (CAB) Waste Management Committee. Once operational, SWPF will separate the highly radioactive cesium and actinides from the salt solution held in the DOE site’s waste storage tanks. About 90 percent of the 36 million gallons of Cold War-era waste in the tanks is salt waste. After completing the separation process, the cesium and actinide waste will be sent to the nearby Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF) for final treatment. The remaining decontaminated salt solution will be mixed with grout at the SRS Saltstone Disposal Facility for disposal on-site.
In the meantime, SRS has been using, and is planning, other methods to treat salt waste, including the projected spring 2018 start-up of the Tank Closure Cesium Removal (TCCR) process. TCCR will remove the cesium from salt waste and make the liquid salt waste suitable for final disposition at the SRS Saltstone facility. TCCR is projected to process about 1 million gallons of waste a year. Jean Ridley, DOE director of waste disposition at Savannah River, said during Tuesday’s meeting that the process is part of the DOE/SCDHEC agreement. “The state has given us a quota that includes output from TCCR,” she said. TCCR is a new process that will treat the salt waste currently in Tank 10. If successful, TCCR can be deployed to treat the salt waste in other tanks and help accelerate cleanup activities in the SRS Liquid Waste System.
DOE announced in June that it had completed construction of the Salt Waste Processing Facility, but a 2006 agreement between the department and SCDHEC required the facility to begin operating by Sept. 30, 2015. The final cost of the facility jumped from the original $1.3 billion projection to $2.3 billion.
Given the delay, the state could have fined the federal government $105,000 a day starting at the earlier date of Sept. 30, 2011, according to the 2006 agreement. SCDHEC has the option to impose the fines if future milestones aren’t met, according to the new agreement. The agreement says DOE is funding roughly $200 million of continuing work on technologies that will improve progress at SWPF and other cleanup facilities. These include funding a “next generation solvent” that is expected to make SWPF more effective by speeding up cesium removal.
Waste Management Committee members did not express much concern during the meeting over the cost overruns, schedule delays, or new deal between the DOE and state agency. Afterward, committee member Earl Sheppard said the new deal is “small step in the right direction,” but that he’s ready to see how effective SWPF will be. “I’m hopeful it’s going to do what we need it to do but I’m anxious to see how well it really works,” he said.
