Pipe modifications in a tank farm at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina are winding down and should be complete in July, according to DOE.
The utility work at the 310-square-mile site near Aiken, S.C., comes during a planned outage, which began on April 28 and is on track to finish within the anticipated, 90-day window, site officials said.
According to a DOE news release, the liquid waste contractor BWXT-led Savannah River Mission Completion (SRMC) moved buried utility lines in the H Tank Farm aboveground, for easier access.. These lines are nonradioactive and provide water, steam, cooling systems in order to keep the tank systems operating. SRMC completed this work last month.
Previously, all utility pipes were buried underground in concrete, making repairs and maintenance work more complicated and time consuming, according to the release. Bringing the pipes aboveground and tying them into the liquid waste system will save time and money by allowing workers to access them quicker.
“This undertaking has lowered the risk of environmental and personnel contamination, as well as tank farm maintenance costs, and provides the reliability necessary to support sludge processing,” Scott Germain, SRMC’s tank farms director, said in the release.
The piping modifications came during the ongoing spring outage that includes suspension of liquid waste treatment. The SRS liquid waste mission includes the processing of 36 million gallons of waste, stored in 43 underground waste tanks. About 90 percent of that volume is salt waste and is processed through the Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF). The other 10 percent is sludge waste and is treated at the Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF).
SRMC is using the three-month outage to make repairs and conduct maintenance at both facilities.