Spring outage underway for SRS liquid waste operations

The Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site is putting liquid waste operations on hold due to a planned maintenance outage that started April 28.

The annual break in operations is expected to last until July and should help increase liquid waste processing at the 310-square-mile site in South Carolina, a Savannah River Site (SRS) spokesperson said.

The environmental cleanup contractor, BWX Technologies-led Savannah River Mission Completion (SRMC), has factored these annual outages into its plans, so there’s no expected, long term impact to the waste mission, the spokesperson said. “During outages, including this one, resources are maximized in order to complete all maintenance, repairs, and upgrades that can only be done when the integrated facilities are not processing,” the spokesperson said.

The Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF), which separates highly-radioactive contaminants such as cesium from less radioactive salt solution, will see a large portion of the repairs during the three-month stretch, officials said.

The SWPF work includes installing larger cross flow filters on the front of the facility to increase waste flow during processing. During a March presentation, SRMC Optimization and Integration Director Mike Borders discussed the spring outage with the SRS Citizens Advisory Board.

Borders said the three filters now in use are not large enough to sustain the increase in treatment the contractor is hoping to achieve. Replacing all three will double SWPF’s ability to filter waste, Borders said.

The spring outage will include maintenance and modifications to the Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF), officials said. DWPF solidifies high-level SRS liquid waste into a glass-like solid form.

The Savannah River Site is home to more than 35 million gallons of radioactive liquid waste stored in 43 of the 51 total underground tanks in the SRS tank farm. About 90 percent of that volume is salt waste, intended for SWPF. The rest is sludge that is processed at DWPF. The two facilities work in tandem to treat the legacy waste.