Construction of the Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF) at the Savannah River Site is expected to cost $1.4 billion more than originally planned and should open roughly a decade later than anticipated, the Department of Energy’s Inspector General’s Office said in a report released Wednesday. The South Carolina installation stores 37 million gallons of high-level radioactive waste produced during former nuclear-weapon manufacturing operations. As a means of ensuring that the underground storage tanks have a sufficient, safe amount of space, evaporation is used to convert the waste into crystallized salts that ultimately must be processed.
The SWPF was intended to serve that purpose, at a cost of $900 million, starting in 2009, according to an Aug. 6 memo from Rickey Hass, DOE deputy inspector general for audits and inspections. He reported that the estimated expense of the full project has risen to $2.3 billion. In addition, “construction is currently only 84 percent complete and the remaining 16 percent of construction activity is significantly more complex. The estimated construction completion date has been pushed back to April 2016, and the Department recently announced that operations would not commence until the first quarter of FY 2019, at the earliest,” according to Hass.
He noted a number of likely reasons for both the schedule delays and price hikes. Among them were defective welds that had to be repaired in SWPF drain line pipes and “significant initial delays in project construction” tied to adding a confinement barrier to prevent the escape of radioactive materials in the event of an earthquake or other natural event. In addition, budget issues have prevented an operational interim salt waste processing plant from operating at its base 3 million gallons annual capacity. Projections called for the facility to process 1.3 million gallons annually from fiscal 2014 to 2018, but the plant only reached 551,000 gallons last year.
The IG report urges the DOE Office of Environmental Management to ensure the interim processing plant has sufficient funding to continue operating in fiscal 2016, and to keep it on standby as needed to support the SWPF beginning in fiscal 2019. The office should also look in fiscal 2021 at finishing work on a suspended supplemental processing facility “to provide optionality if SWPF has operating issues,” Hass said.
