Uranium recovery at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina will resume next month when the site’s H Canyon facility restarts head end operations, meaning it will begin the initial processing stage.
During an SRS Citizens Advisory Board (CAB) meeting on Tuesday, the site’s DOE Office of Environmental Management executive Edwin Deshong said DOE recently completed reviews for restart of H Canyon, a production-scale chemical separations plant built in the 1950s and is the last of its kind in the United States.
Converting highly-enriched uranium (HEU) into low-enriched uranium (LEU) was a key mission at the canyon from 1995 until 2022, when DOE halted the mission. Now, H Canyon will resume this mission at the 310-square mile Savannah River Site. However, it will instead produce high assay low-enriched uranium, or HALEU. This specific type of uranium can be sold and used to power advanced reactors.
DOE officials have said H Canyon could produce roughly 19 metric tons of HALEU.
DOE announced plans for H Canyon’s revived role more than seven months ago.
“We used to process this uranium and send it to the tank farms for disposal,” DeShong said. “Now, we can recapture these essential materials and use them for special reactors.”
DeShong further explained that the uranium stored on site is a combination of domestic uranium from other DOE facilities, and foreign uranium SRS received from other countries through various agreements. For example, DOE announced in June that SRS accepted all of Venezuela’s HEU from its RV-1 research reactor.
Tuesday’s announcement is the latest in multiple steps over the past few years. In July 2025, DOE announced a revised record of decision (ROD) for blending down highly enriched uranium to HALEU at Savannah River. And in December 2023, a Government Accountability Office report said Environmental Management planned to work with DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy on downblending material for HALEU.
Later in the meeting, members of the Citizens Advisory Board voted to table a recommendation that asks DOE to prioritize funding for liquid waste treatment. The recommendation points to newer missions, such as a proposed data center, and asks that DOE not pull funding from liquid waste treatment to fund less urgent missions.
Specifically, the CAB asks that DOE ensure liquid waste funding is not diverted or delayed, and that an impact study be presented to the CAB before any ground breaking occurs. The study should detail “how the massive water, regulatory, and infrastructure demands of the proposed commercial power plant will be isolated from current liquid waste processing facilities to prevent operational interference, and ensure the (liquid waste) 2037 Operational Closure goal remains intact.”