The Energy Department said last week it is about halfway through a major cleanup step for a 750,000-gallon waste tank at the Savannah River Site, which federal law requires the agency to fill with cement-like grout by May 31.
Tank 12, one of the last to be taken out of service at the Aiken, S.C., site’s H-Area by contractor Savannah River Remediation, is just over half full, with some 490,000 gallons of grout poured in since January, DOE said Thursday. It takes about three months to fill up the entire tank, according to a press release. The tank was supposed to be filled by now, but DOE renegotiated its deadlines with Environmental Protection Agency to delay the end of the job until later this year.
DOE’s cleanup regimen calls for leaving some liquid waste inside the tanks. To decrease the possibility of this waste spreading beyond the tanks, it is mixed into grout. The tanks at Savannah River’s H-Area were built in the 1950s to temporarily store liquid waste from plutonium production until the U.S. decided on a permanent storage site — which so far it has not.
Awarded in 2008, Savannah River Remediation’s liquid-waste cleanup contract is worth roughly $4 billion through June 2017. DOE picked up a two-year, $800 million option on the deal last year. The contractor is a partnership comprising AECOM, Bechtel National, CH2M, and BWX Technologies.
