The Salt Waste Processing Facility, the centerpiece of Department of Energy plans to empty tanks at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina of 36 million gallons of radioactive waste, is back in operation after shutting down in late March.
The Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF) resumed its work on a limited basis May 3, a DOE spokesperson at Savannah River said in a Friday email. “We expect SWPF will resume routine operations later this month.”
Parsons, which built the 140,000-square-foot plant and got permission to start it up last fall, has been working with the Savannah River National Laboratory as well as DOE’s liquid waste contractor, Savannah River Remediation, to tackle problems that had curtailed processing since March 24, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board said in an April 16 staff report posted online last week.
Recently, unacceptably high levels of residual levels of the organic solvent used to remove cesium from the salt waste were found in the decontaminated salt solution produced by SWPF. The residue exceeded DOE limits for transfer to other facilities, the spokesperson said. SWPF feeds the Defense Waste Processing Facility and the Saltstone Production Facility.
To fix the problem, DOE and Parsons replaced internal components of the coalescer equipment – which had suffered a “mechanical failure,” the spokesperson said. Various types of mechanical coalescers are used in the oil, gas and petrochemical industries to separate commingled liquids. The coalescer in the SWPF is a cylindrical piece of equipment approximately 3 feet in diameter and 15 feet long, according to the spokesperson.
Since starting radioactive operations in October 2020, SWPF has processed over 900,000 gallons of waste. Parsons is running the plant for its first full year of operations and is scheduled to turn over the reins to Amentum-led Savannah River Remediation in January 2022. SWPF is expected to process between four to six million gallons in its first year of operation, the Savannah River spokesperson said.
The SWPF is meant to treat 90% of the tank waste left over from nuclear weapons work at the site by separating highly-radioactive elements including cesium and strontium from the less radioactive salt solution. The concentrated high-activity waste is then moved to the nearby Defense Waste Processing Facility.
The DOE hopes to have this process nearly finished by 2030.
