The DOE said its Office of Environmental Management had validated radiation shielding, environmental emissions, and product waste acceptance requirements while processing about 1.4 million litres of radioactive liquid waste from a tank farm at Savannah River.
Completion of the hot commissioning testing phase signals the facility’s entrance into fully integrated operations with the other Savannah River liquid waste facilities.
Parsons Corporation, the contractor that designed and built the first-of-a-kind facility, will now operate SWPF for one year, beginning this month. It is anticipated the facility will process up to 27 million litres of waste during the first year of operations. SWPF is designed to significantly increase the site’s ability to empty and close radioactive waste tanks and dramatically reduce that legacy environmental risk.
Startup of the SWPF is the last major piece of the liquid waste system at Savannah River and represents a significant leap forward in the DOE’s ability to tackle the largest and one of the most challenging environmental risks – legacy radioactive tank waste. Now that SWPF is fully operational, it is expected that nearly all of the salt waste inventory at Savannah River will be processed by 2030.
The facility will process most of the site’s salt waste inventory by separating the highly radioactive waste – mostly caesium, strontium, actinides, and waste slurry – from the less radioactive salt solution.
After the initial separation process is completed, the concentrated high-activity waste will be sent to the nearby defence waste processing facility (DWPF). The decontaminated salt solution will be mixed with cement-like grout at the nearby Saltstone facility for disposal on site.
Removing salt waste, which fills over 90% of tank space in the Savannah River tank farms, is a major step towards emptying and closing the site’s remaining 43 high-level waste tanks.
Savannah River was built during the 1950s to refine nuclear materials for deployment in nuclear weapons. It is home to the Savanna River National Laboratory.
