Jeremy L. Dillon
WC Monitor
10/2/2015
Parsons anticipates finalizing construction of the Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF) at the Savannah River Site by April 2016 at a total cost of $475 million, Project Manager Frank Sheppard said this week at the Department of Energy’s National Cleanup Workshop in Arlington, Va. That would bring the project in under budget and ahead of schedule compared to the renegotiated 2013 contract between DOE and Parsons that budgeted $575 million for construction and set a Dec. 31, 2016, completion date for the waste disposal facility. “I am pleased to state that our projected construction complete date is April 22, 2016, and our projected cost is $475 million—well below the $530 million,” Sheppard said. “We have less than seven months to go, and we are performing very well along with our DOE team members and continue with system turnovers.”
As construction winds down, the emphasis has turned to turnover of systems within the facility, Sheppard said. Seventy-one systems need to go through turnover before construction is officially completed, and Parsons has already “completed several final turnovers to date” while also “initiating many, many initial walk-downs” and completing “a number of upcoming final turnovers in the next two or three months,” Sheppard said. The timeline for final construction details include the finishing of welding in the November/December timeframe and the flushing of hydros to test the system in the December/January timeframe, Sheppard said. “It’s always difficult to transition out of the craft work and into the testing phase, but we are prepared to do that and we are prepared to handle the risks moving forward,” Sheppard said.
The SWPF had originally been scheduled to complete startup by an October 2015 regulatory commitment, but in 2012 lengthy delays in completion of a key set of vessels set that back. In 2013, DOE and construction contractor Parsons reached an agreement to complete construction by the end of 2016, with incentives for the contractor for early completion, and last September DOE approved a new baseline including those dates. The SWPF would be used to process crystallized salts that are created through conversion of the waste, which is a current means of providing a sufficient, safe amount of space in the underground storage tanks. DOE currently is operating under a December 2018 start date for operations at the facility.
DOE has pointed to the end of construction of SWPF as one of the major Environmental Management successes coming in 2016. Along with the demolition of the Plutonium Finishing Plant in Hanford and the demolition of K-27 at Oak Ridge, DOE-EM is trying to celebrate the successes and use them for momentum to reach other cleanup goals. “2016 is indeed going to be a busy year for us, but it is going to extremely rewarding,” DOE-EM Assistant Secretary Monica Regalbuto said at the Cleanup Workshop.
