Jumbo Saltstone Disposal Unit at SRS now set to store processed waste

Colin Demarest, Aiken Standard, S.C.
·2 min read

Oct. 27—A massive vault at the Savannah River Site will receive processed radioactive waste for the first time later this fiscal year, after the Department of Energy's nuclear cleanup office approved of the project's recent completion.

The realization of Saltstone Disposal Unit 7, dozens of feet tall and hundreds of feet wide, marks a win for Savannah River Remediation, the liquid-waste contractor at the site south of Aiken, and cracks open another avenue for the long-term cleanup of the federal reservation.

"The safe completion of the SDU 7 project ahead of schedule and under cost, combined with the approval to construct the last three SDUs, facilitates completion of the mission to remove and treat all remaining high-level waste stored in South Carolina," Shayne Farrell, a federal project director, said in a statement.

Millions of gallons of radioactive waste are currently stored at the Savannah River Site, where plutonium for the nation's nuclear arsenal was once produced.

The Saltstone Disposal Units at the Savannah River Site are designed to permanently house the waste, once it has been decontaminated and combined with other stabilizing materials. Saltstone Disposal Unit 7 can store 32 million gallons and is regarded as "mega-volume" — just like its nearby sister, Saltstone Disposal Unit 6, which kicked off operations in 2017.

"We used to put saltstone into smaller, essentially, storage units," Savannah River Remediation President and Project Manager Phil Breidenbach said at an event in October 2020. "The idea was, since we're going to do all this work and we're going to have all this waste, let's make them bigger. And so we made them bigger."

Work at Saltstone Disposal Unit 7 was paused at least twice last year: once because of the coronavirus, and again because of a forklift accident. Breidenbach at one point predicted the disposal unit would be operational by spring 2022.