A $122 million waste disposal facility at the Savannah River Site is undergoing a readiness assessment and should be available for use about one year sooner than expected, the Department of Energy said Tuesday.
The DOE site in South Carolina tweeted Tuesday that it is entering the final readiness assessment for Saltstone Disposal Unit (SDU) 6, the first 30-million gallon, megavolume salt waste concrete storage unit constructed at SRS. Once complete, it will be a permanent disposal unit for saltstone, a low radioactive salt waste held in the SRS storage tanks.
SDU 6 was initially slated for completion in May 2018. But, according to SRS, the unit will be completed about a year sooner.
That is in line with statements from DOE SRS Manager Jack Craig in a site report last month. In the report, Craig said construction has been completed, and that the unit was being connected to the site’s Saltstone facility, which is comprised of other units that are used to process and store salt waste.
The Savannah River Site reported in January that the unit passed a leak tightness test to ensure it would hold the Cold War-era radioactive salt waste. The came after a May 2016 announcement that the initial leak test had failed. To pass the second test, SRS liquid waste contractor Savannah River Remediation (SRR) installed an interior liner to protect the concrete shell from chemical degradation and achieve leak tightness.
The site’s other Saltstone Disposal Facilities include Vaults 1 and 4, along with SDUs 2, 3, and 5. Each of the three units consists of two tanks, each able to hold up to 2.9 million gallons of waste. According to Revision 20 of the SRS Liquid Waste System Plan, another eight units will be needed to complete the liquid waste mission, with SDU 7 projected to be needed by fiscal 2021.
