Liquid waste work at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina resumed recently, following an annual maintenance outage.
While major waste treatment facilities at the 310-square-mile complex have resumed operations, some outage tasks have not yet been completed, according to DOE.
Liquid waste contractor Savannah River Mission Completion began the outage on April 28, with an expected timeline of about 90 days. An SRS spokesperson said the site’s Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF) resumed work July 30, and the neighboring Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF) did the same on Aug. 4.
Maintenance work conducted at the defense waste facility during the outage included repairs to its large crane— used to view and conduct work at hard-to-reach areas—and upgrades to the 10 cameras on the crane. The spokesperson said the crane repairs and camera upgrades were completed, but testing is ongoing.
DWPF staff also converted a pump pit between the two facilities into extra storage space for strip effluent, a solvent that assists in decontaminating salt waste by extracting cesium from the waste. That task was fully completed, the spokesperson said.
At SWPF, workers installed larger cross flow filters on the front of the facility to increase waste flow during processing, and added additional flow meters in order to better determine when a filter needs to be cleaned. The spokesperson said this work is not fully complete given that it needs to be inspected and certified by a third party.