The Department of Energy expects budget constraints to restrict the amount of high-level waste that can be transferred from Savannah River’s H-Canyon to the site’s tank farms, potentially impacting future missions for the facility. DOE requested $260 million for Fiscal Year 2015 for nuclear material stabilization and disposition at Savannah River, compared to $272 million in enacted funding in FY’14. DOE informed M&O contractor Savannah River Nuclear Solutions that it will be limited to transferring 50,000 gallons of high level waste from H-Canyon to H-Tank Farms this fiscal year, 150,000 gallons next year, and then 105,000 gallons each year between 2016 and 2019, according to a recently posted July 25 Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board staff report. “While SRNS has been trying to reduce the volume of waste they transfer, these volumes will likely impact the amount of spent nuclear fuel, plutonium, and enriched uranium that can be processed,” the report states.
H-Canyon is gearing up for several new missions, including a campaign to process used fuel in Savannah River’s L-Basin and highly enriched uranium from Canada, and a potential effort to process German fuel. The advocacy group Savannah River Site Watch saw the report as a sign that DOE may back away from the potential new efforts. “It is unavoidable that plans to turn SRS into a processing facility for foreign nuclear waste will be impacted and likely killed,” Tom Clements of SRS Watch said in a statement. “This situation with H-Canyon underscores that SRS must not be turned into a facility for either storage or processing of foreign nuclear waste as that would negatively impact both on-going cleanup activities and result in more waste being dumped at the site. H-Canyon must not be turned into a profit-making facility for contractors as is being eyed with the deals with Canada and Germany and instead must remain solely focused on clean up of existing SRS nuclear materials.”
