Since starting up in October, the Salt Waste Processing Facility at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina has processed 1 million gallons of radioactive tank waste, plant builder Parson wrote this week in press release.
The 140,000-square-foot Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF) is the center of DOE plans to empty 36 million gallons of tank waste within a decade. Parson is scheduled to operate it until January 2022, and resolve any glitches, before turning over the keys to Amentum-led Savannah River Remediation, the waste management contractor at the site.
“The operational success of SWPF is a testament to the commitment and dedication of the DOE and Parsons workforce over the last 19 years through design, development, testing, and now processing” Chris Alexander, president of Parsons engineered systems business unit, said Mondays’ press release.
The facility was offline for about 40 days between late March and early May as DOE and Parsons replaced some internal equipment components after finding residual levels of the organic solvent used to remove cesium from the salt waste was too high. The SWPF still has a long way to go in order to reach the DOE goal of processing four million to six million gallons annually.
The SWPF utilizes a two-stage process beginning with removal of strontium and actinides from the waste. Then, the plant uses Caustic Side Solvent Extraction, to remove radioactive cesium, according to the DOE.
Afterward, the concentrated high-activity waste is sent to the Defense Waste Processing Facility at Savannah River and the decontaminated salt solution is mixed with grout at the nearby Saltstone Production Facility (SPF) for onsite disposal.
The hot commissioning process, which involved only small batches of radioactive waste to ensure the SWPF’s systems worked, was completed in January.
