A top manager at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina expects upcoming modifications to the Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF) should help the plant meet its elusive production goals.
When it started hot operations in October 2020, SWPF was expected to treat between four million and six million gallons of salt waste in its first full year. But the first-of-its-kind plant took about four years to reach a total of 10-million gallons of high-level waste treated.
So far, the SWPF has processed more than 10.8 millions of salt waste since opening, according to Michael Budney, who heads DOE’s Office of Environmental Management at Savannah River. Budney gave an update on the processing facility at Monday’s SRS Citizens Advisory Board (CAB) meeting in Charleston.
Since the CAB last met in November, the SWPF has ramped up production, including a record-setting week of more than 149,000 gallons of salt waste treated at the facility, Budney said. DOE and its cleanup contract have taken a variety of steps, including ordering more spare parts, in order to reduce outages at SWPF.
Production should increase more around June or July, when workers install new, longer filters that will expedite waste treatment, Budney said. SWPF will undergo a planned outage to install the filters. “Overall, the SWPF system is operating pretty well at this point,” Budney said, adding that remediation efforts have also increased by focusing on salt waste with the highest curies, which is the unit of measurement for radioactivity. SRS was asked for a timeline of the work, but has not yet responded.
Even with these production plans, however, SWPF is still failing to reach its intended maximum output of 9 million gallons per year. Currently, SWPF averages 6 million gallons per year, though that includes just 3.17 million gallons in 2024. Lower production can be attributed to planned and unplanned outages, as well as issues at the neighboring Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF), Budney said.
The SWPF is designed to separate highly-radioactive contaminates from the salt waste.
The 310-square-mile Savannah River Site, near the border of Aiken, S.C. and Augusta, Ga., is home to more than 35 million gallons of radioactive liquid waste stored in 43 of the 51 total underground tanks in the SRS tank farm. About 90 percent of that volume is salt waste, intended for SWPF. The rest is sludge waste, which is processed at DWPF.
That facility, which began operations in March 1996, routinely sees outages and a need for repairs, due to its high level of usage for nearly 30 years. These issues, in addition to production setbacks at SWPF, are limiting the overall liquid waste treatment performance, Budney said. “It’s a challenge to keep (DWPF) running at the rate we need it, but a significant effort has been spent into making necessary repairs and improvements,” he said. SRS was asked for more specifics on issues at the DWPF, but has not yet responded.
Liquid waste treatment at SRS is overseen by contractor Savannah River Mission Completion (SRMC), a group that includes BWX Technologies, Amentum and Fluor. The contractor reported last month that more than 23 million curies have been processed from the waste tanks since it took over the liquid waste contract in February 2022. That is the highest amount in any two-year span at the site.
