The Salt Waste Processing Facility at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina should treat 4.75 million gallons of salt waste in fiscal 2023, continuing to lag behind its 9-million-gallon annual target, a manager for the site’s cleanup contractor said Tuesday.
But implementation of the next generation solvent in fiscal 2024, should raise Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF) throughput to 5.8 million gallons that year before increasing to between eight and nine million gallons for each of the following three years, Pete Hill, manager of system planning for Savannah River Mission Completion, said Tuesday at a citizen’s advisory board meeting.
In 2021, DOE was shooting for between 4 million and 6 million gallons treated during the first full year of operation.
Hill addressed Tuesday’s meeting of DOE’s Savannah River Site Citizens Advisory Board. BWX Technologies-led Savannah River Mission Completion is the contractor charged with remediating liquid radioactive waste at the former plutonium production campus by 2037.
The new solvent is engineered to help SWPF remove more cesium from Savannah River’s liquid waste, according to DOE.
The SWPF separates the highly radioactive cesium and actinides from a salt solution, sending the high-level waste to the Defense Waste Processing Facility for vitrification into glass form and the low-activity waste is sent to the onsite Saltstone Disposal Facility.
The SWPF has been gradually running for longer periods of time without having to shut down to clean equipment, Edwin Deshong, the DOE Office of Environmental Management’s deputy for the Savannah River field office, told the advisory board on Monday.
The SWPF, built by Parsons, started radiological operations in October 2020, and should finish its saltstone treatment mission in fiscal 2035, HIll said. If everything goes as hoped, DOE will conclude its liquid waste mission at Savannah River in 2037 and start turning the buildings over to decommissioning, Hill said.
The dates are not guaranteed, said Michael Budney, Savannah River’s top Environmental Management office boss. This is because of factors ranging from budget constraints to technical and operational challenges, he added.
In March of this year, DOE produced a draft of the 23rd revision of its roadmap for liquid waste at the Savannah River Site and the federal agency made the document publicly available this week.
It is the first revision of that roadmap since September 2021. Since the last update, the target date for conclusion of SWPF operations slipped to 2035 from 2033, but the date for the end of Defense Waste Processing Facility operations improved to 2036 from 2038.
The latest plan also assumes the disposition of spent fuel via dissolution at H Canyon without uranium recovery.
Since its inception in 1951, the Savannah River Site has produced nuclear material for national defense, research, medical, and space programs. As of September 2022, more than 34.5 gallons of radioactive waste, left over from decades of nuclear work, are stored in underground waste storage tanks at the federal property, according to the 2023 report.
