Demolition of a Cold War-era legacy facility in December still leaves more than 1,100 facilities and buildings to tear down at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
Specifically, 1,127 facilities have been identified for eventual demolition, SRS spokesman Monte Volk said via email. Those facilities encompass offices, power production plants, and the “canyons” used for processing nuclear materials. Some remain operational today.
Teardown is part of the site’s overall cleanup mission, scheduled for completion in 2065 at a total projected cost of $39 billion to $57 billion.
The legacy facility mission is carried out by Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS), the management and operations contractor at the 310-square-mile site near Aiken, S.C. In December, workers demolished a building that had been used until 1993 to repair heavily shielded railroad cask cars that once carried nuclear materials from reactor buildings to chemical processing facilities at SRS during the Cold War era.
The recent demolition brings the total to 292 since SRS began the mission in 1997. It is unclear how much has been spent on that work over 23 years.
“SRS is responsible for a wide variety of projects and missions. However, as we grow in some areas, we no longer need to incur the ongoing costs to maintain obsolete structures,” Rick Sprague, Savannah River Nuclear Solutions senior vice president for safety and health, said in a Dec. 12 press release after the facility was torn down.
Last week, Volk said some of these facilities are still operating, but that all of them are slated for demolition by 2065.
The full environmental remediation mission includes treatment, storage, and ultimately on-and off-site disposal of more than 40 million gallons of radioactive sludge and salt waste, along with closure of more than 40 underground storage tanks that house the waste. It also includes the deactivation of waste processing facilities and breaking down those facilities, as well as other legacy buildings.
“Waste materials go to on/offsite regulatory approved disposal facilities or made available for reuse/recycling,” Volk said by email, adding that the available space from the demolished buildings can be used for future missions at the site.
Volk could not provide a specific spending total for the mission, since dollars come from a larger budget line that also includes soil, groundwater, and surface water remediation. That budget line received $81.2 million in fiscal 2018, $73.6 million in 2019, and $65.5 million in 2020.
