Savannah River?s HB Line in ?Safety Pause,? Processing Expected to Resume in Early Summer

With Savannah River’s HB-Line in a “safety pause” since an incident in January, processing is expected to resume in the early summer after a recovery plan and corrective actions are put in place, DOE Savannah River spokesman Jim Giusti said yesterday. The incident occurred in early January when an outage cut off power to the facility. While power was restored the next day, an agitator did not come back online and the issue wasn’t discovered for a month, compromising one of the facility’s nuclear criticality controls.

 

While HB-Line has been in a “safety pause,” contractor Savannah River Nuclear Solutions completed a recovery plan on March 30 that is being evaluated by DOE-Savannah River, Giusti said. “Additional corrective actions are being developed to evaluate the Nuclear Criticality Safety Evaluation and Double Contingency Analysis to prevent recurrence,” Giusti said. “Since all corrective actions are not yet developed, we estimate HB-Line operations will resume in early summer.” The only mission currently impacted by the event is the the Alternate Feed Stock campaign, which produces plutonium oxide as feed material for the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility.