Environmental Management (EM) missions at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina are in line to receive $287 million more in the next federal budget than they received in fiscal 2017, with a strong emphasis on liquid waste cleanup.
A budget justification detailing specific funding lines for President Donald Trump’s fiscal 2019 budget proposal has not yet surfaced. But the spending plan released Monday would provide $1.7 billion for Savannah River cleanup activities. The budget summary says SRS would see a “significant increase in the production at the Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF) and startup of the Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF).
The DWPF converts highly radioactive waste stored at the DOE site into a solid glass form for storage. The facility is designed to process over 30 million gallons of sludge and salt waste stored in more than 40 waste storage tanks, a byproduct of Cold War nuclear weapons operations at SRS.
In 2016, SRS completed construction of the SWPF, with startup slated for December of this year. A proxy facility has been treating the salt waste, allowing it to then go to the SRS Saltstone facilities for permanent disposal. But once the SWPF comes online, waste processing is expected to jump from 1.5 million gallons per year to 6 million.
Liquid waste treatment and tank closures have been the budget priority at SRS for years. The site received $712 million in fiscal 2015, $784 million in fiscal 2016, and about $766 million through fiscal 2017. So far through more than four months of fiscal 2018, Congress has kept the federal government running by a series of short-term budgets that have largely frozen spending levels at prior-year levels.
The Energy Department reported in 2015 that the anticipated completion of liquid waste cleanup at Savannah River had been pushed back from 2042 to 2065, with the cost surging to $25 billion more than the original estimate. New cost projections reported at the time were between $91 billion and $109 billion.
