A least one liquid waste-related operation is ongoing at the Savannah River Site, despite the temporary halting of liquid waste processing earlier this year.
At a Savannah River Site (SRS) Citizens Advisory Board meeting last week, a DOE official said the site is about halfway through its checklist on the Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF): a plant expected to increase the rate of liquid radioactive waste processing at SRS four-fold to roughly 6 million gallons a year.
Terry Spears, deputy manager for DOE SRS, told the citizens board last week that testing and commissioning of SWPF is about 50 percent complete and that “operations with radioactive waste remains on schedule for a December 2018 startup.”
In March, SRS told the Citizens Advisory Board that liquid waste processing at the Aiken, S.C., site had halted due to the failure of Melter 2: a 65-ton, refractory-lined melting vessel that functions as part of the Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF). The halt is expected to last through the rest of the fiscal year as the Savannah River Site (SRS) prepares Melter 3 to take over.
All told, SRS is home to just under 35 million gallons of radioactive waste. The waste is stored in the aging tanks and is a byproduct of weapons production from the Cold War era.
About 90 percent of the SRS tank volume is salt waste; the rest is sludge waste. The two types of waste are treated separately but similarly. Salt waste is treated using the Actinide Removal Process, which extracts radioactive isotopes from the salt waste including cesium, strontium, and actinides. Those isotopes are sent to the nearby DWPF where, like the sludge, they are mixed with a sand-like glass and transferred to canisters for temporary storage on site. The decontaminated salt waste is sent to the SRS Saltstone facilities for permanent storage.
SRS had a goal of producing 100 canisters in fiscal year 2017, which ends Sept. 30. Prior to the outage, it produced 52 canisters.
