The H-Canyon processing facilities at the Energy Department’s Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina currently generate roughly 100,000 gallons per year of radioactive liquid waste, a figure expected to grow to about 200,000 per year in fiscal 2022.
After fiscal 2022, the amount of liquid waste going from H-Canyon into the SRS liquid waste program could reach 300,000 gallons annually, a DOE spokesperson said by email Friday. This is the only new liquid waste being added to the site’s stock of 35 million gallons left over from Cold War operations and managed by AECOM-led Savannah River Remediation (SRR).
The Energy Department recently announced it would extend the SRR contract, scheduled to expire at the end of March, by 18 months through September 2020.
In last month canceling the procurement for a new decade-long, multibillion-dollar liquid waste contract at Savannah River, the Energy Department said it wants the L-Basin and H-Canyon facilities integrated into the eventual follow-on award. The planned change is contractual rather than physical, according to DOE.
Both L-Basin and H-Canyon are now managed by site prime Savannah River Nuclear Solutions.
L-Basin holds spent nuclear fuel from foreign and domestic research reactors. After this fuel is dissolved in H-Canyon, the waste streams go into the tanks managed by SRR.
In addition to AECOM, the other Savannah River Remediation partners are Bechtel, Jacobs subsidiary CH2M, and BWX Technologies. It began work on an eight-year, $4.7 billion contract in July 2009. Since that contract expired at the end of June 2017, SRR has been issued a number of short-term extensions.
