A 30-million-gallon reservoir for decontaminated salt waste at the Savannah River Site will be ready about seven months later than expected, but still much sooner than the Energy Department is expected to need it, a project manager with the site’s liquid waste contractor said Monday.
The massive tank will be ready in May 2017, Jon Lunn, project manager for Saltstone Disposal Unit 6 at Savannah River Remediation, said in prepared remarks to the DOE-chartered Savannah River Site (SRS) Citizens Advisory Board.
Despite the slip, the second for the project this year, Lunn said SDU 6 is a “healthy, successful project” that will be ready “well ahead” of the its so-called system plan need date of February 2018.
Savannah River Remediation had been experimenting with different methods to leak proof SDU 6, which failed a leak test in November 2015, then again in May. SDU 6 is based on a commercial design, but unlike commercial reservoirs of its kind is being specced for 100-percent leak-tightness. That is a requirement the concrete tank cannot meet without use of a rubber sealant now being applied to the reservoir’s interior by a vendor, Lunn said.
The schedule slip, while relatively minor, is the second disclosed this year for SDU 6. In written remarks from DOE officials shared during a May 2016 meeting of the SRS Citizens Advisory Board, the agency said SDU 6 would be ready in March because of delays associated with this year’s failed leak test.
Saltstone Disposal Units are the permanent on-site repositories for millions of gallons of low-activity salt waste solidified from the SRS liquid-waste tank farms and mixed with concrete for safety and ease of storage. The liquid tank-farm waste itself, some 36 million gallons of it, is the byproduct of decades of nuclear weapon production during the Cold Wars arms race.
