A major waste treatment facility at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina was placed in deliberate operations last month following multiple safety-related incidents in recent months.
The Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF) entered into deliberate operations – in which workers pay extra attention to detail and planning when conducting work — on June 20, according to a June 23 site report from the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB). The move followed three technical safety requirement violations and a contamination incident.
“DO will be utilized to provide temporary compensatory measures to address the recent trend of poor [technical safety requirement] administration, and will apply to all work performed on safety class (SC), safety significant (SS) and all SC/SS supporting equipment,” the DNFSB said, indicating that deliberate operations also applied to Saltstone work at the Savannah River Site.
It was not immediately clear whether the operations status was still in place as of this week.
Cold War-era liquid radioactive waste stored at SRS is converted into a glass form at DWPF
for interim storage on site until a long-term federal repository is built. The plant has suspended waste processing operations while it waits for a new melter, limiting the impact of any slowdown associated with deliberate operations.
All told, SRS houses more than 30 million gallons of waste in over 40 underground tanks. About 90 percent of that material is salt waste and the rest is sludge.
The DWPF is operated by Savannah River Remediation (SRR), the site’s liquid waste management prime. The contractor is a partnership of AECOM, Bechtel National, CH2M, and BWX Technologies.
In a prepared statement, DOE said Tuesday that “There were no injuries to workers and no impact to the facilities or the environment. The facilities remain in a safe state. The incidents are being investigated to determine corrective actions as appropriate.”
