The U.S. Energy Department on Tuesday issued the 2018 Project Excellence Award to the team in charge of building Saltstone Disposal Unit (SDU) 6, a 30-million-gallon salt waste disposal concrete unit constructed at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
Liquid waste contractor Savannah River Remediation (SRR) in July completed the disposal unit 18 months early and at a final cost of $118 million – about $25 million less than expected. The contractor led the effort with support from DOE personnel at the site.
The unit serves as a permanent disposal unit for saltstone, a low-radioactive salt waste found in the SRS storage tanks.
The Savannah River Site currently houses more than 30 million gallons of radioactive liquid waste that was generated during Cold War production of nuclear weapons. About 90 percent of that waste is salt waste and the rest is sludge. The salt waste is processed at Savannah River, and the resulting less-radioactive grouted solution so far has been stored in much smaller disposal units on-site.
Saltstone Disposal Unit 6 is 10 times larger than those prior units. Its presence allows the Energy Department to save roughly $500 million that would have spent on building several smaller disposal units.
By the end of the liquid waste mission, SRS is expected to house about 230 million gallons of treated salt waste. The Savannah River Site will need six more of the larger SDUs, among other facilities, to complete its liquid waste mission.
In November, the SDU 6 project also won the DOE Project of the Year Award for the DOE Office of Environmental Management (EM).
