A maintenance outage last year at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina helped improve operations at the site’s Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF), DOE said recently.
The DOE Office of Environmental Management contractor installed larger, higher-capacity cross flow filters at the SWPF during a planned system-wide operational outage in 2025 to make repairs and upgrades to liquid waste facilities at the 310-square-site.
During the outage, the SWPF, which converts millions of gallons of waste at the site into a less radioactive salt solution, went from one filter to three during the outage. Now, according to a Dec. 23 news release, BWX Technologies-led contractor Savannah River Mission Completion (SRMC) swapped the three filters out with larger ones.
SRMC engineers replaced the 10-foot-long filters, containing 234 filter tubes, with 16-foot-long filters, containing 288 filter tubes, according to the release. This move doubled the available surface area of the filters, and led to a new 30-day processing record in November of over 600,000 gallons of salt waste.
“SWPF is the key facility to remediate the remaining tank waste,” Tony Robinson, DOE-Savannah River acting assistant manager for waste disposition, said in the news release. “The increased processing rate and improved operational reliability of SWPF will accelerate the tank waste mission and reduce the risks of this legacy waste.”
All told, the liquid waste mission at Savannah River includes the treatment of more than 35 million gallons of Cold War-era radioactive waste, stored in 51 underground tanks. Eight of the tanks have already been operationally closed, leaving 43 tanks remaining. SWPF will treat salt waste, which accounts for 90 percent of the waste volume, and the remaining sludge waste is treated at the neighboring Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF).
In addition to the cross flow filters, the news release also touted the use of ultrasonic cleaning at SWPF by liquid waste contractor Savannah River Mission Completion (SRMC). During waste cleanup, workers have to manually remove excess buildup. Now, SRMC has demonstrated that it can use ultrasonic cleaning, which uses imploding sound wave bubbles to scrub out additional waste.