PHOENIX — By the end of 2020, the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management expects to start operation of facilities in Idaho and South Carolina that will convert radioactive tank waste into stable forms for eventual disposal, agency officials said here Monday.
The Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF) at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit (IWTU) at the Idaho National Laboratory are nearing operations after years of preparation and some setbacks.
The $470 million Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF) is built by Parson. The estimated $1 billion IWTU project is being brought online by Fluor Idaho.
Most of the 35 million gallons of radioactive waste stored in tanks at the Savannah River Site is salt waste. The SWPF will extract and then move cesium to the nearby Defense Waste Processing Facility for further processing. It is designed to process upward of 7.3 million gallons of liquid salt waste per year. The new facility will be operated by builder Parsons for a year before being turned over to Savannah River’s liquid waste management contractor.
Operations should begin a few weeks after Parsons makes tweaks recommended in a February readiness reviews, sources said this week. With construction done in June 2016, DOE and Parsons targeted a December 2018 startup. That projection was delayed due to valve replacements and other technical issues, but operations will still start before the January 2021 deadline Parsons agreed to in the contract
In late 2020, IWTU will start treating 900,000 gallons of sodium-bearing liquid radioactive waste. The waste will be turned into a more stable form for permanent disposal. Under a legal agreement between DOE, Idaho, and the Navy, the plant was supposed to start operating in 2012 but it didn’t work as designed. Much work has been done to the IWTU since then and it underwent successful testing in 2019, according to DOE.
In addition, construction of the Direct-Feed Low-Activity Waste system (DFLAW) should wrap up this year at the Waste Treatment Plant being built by Bechtel at the Hanford Site in Washington state, DOE Senior Adviser for Environmental Management William (Ike) White said in a presentation to the Waste Management Symposia. The system would convert Hanford’s low-activity waste into glass, starting by 2023.
While White has previously discussed the impending milestones in the three waste management projects, he cited them Monday as part of an annual priorities and strategic vision statement rolled out by Environmental Management.
In addition to construction projects, DOE will soon wrap up key demolition projects such as the Plutonium Finishing Plant at Hanford, the document notes. Teardown of the massive X-326 uranium enrichment process building will also begin at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio this summer, according to a bullet-point list of priorities.
White called starting demolition of the building a major “skyline” change at the Piketon, Ohio, site. “There’s no better illustration of progress than seeing buildings come down to rubble” and then eventually give way to grass, White said.
A third priority will be shrinking the nuclear cleanup footprint in the near future by officially closing out remediation of the Separations Process Research Unit (SPRU) in upstate New York, where Amentum has finished virtually all of the physical work.
Other priorities in the near term include issuance of new contracts, such as a stand-alone operations agreement for the Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina, and completion of an environmental analysis for a pilot run of the agency’s new high-level radioactive waste interpretation, which could involve shipping recycled wastewater from Savannah River to an out-of-state low-level waste disposal site.
In addition to the 2020 priorities, there is an attached 66-page document on Environmental Management priorities between 2020 and 2030. Some of the decade-long plans include completion of a major ventilation project and other infrastructure upgrades at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, and closure of 22 of the 51 waste tanks at SRS.
The strategy provides a “vivid picture” of what the complex will look like in 2030, with less untreated tank waste and fewer contaminated buildings, White said.
