Patterson: SRS ready to eliminate Cold War waste, if Congress will fund it

The Governor’s Nuclear Advisory Council is charged with monitoring the progress of waste-disposition activities at the Savannah River Site. Given the federal budget, the task is akin to watching a mountain erode. So real progress in dispositioning waste is something to celebrate. Thanks to perseverance, creativity and cooperation by the Department of Energy and its contractors, Parsons and Savannah River Remediation, South Carolina finally has something to celebrate: the ability to vitrify all the liquid radioactive waste left from the Cold War, thus eliminating the risks of that waste to South Carolina.

The Salt Waste Processing Facility is within a year of being completed, and the total cost will be well below the original 2001 budget projection. Once construction is done, Parsons will spend another 18 months or so testing the facility before actually processing radioactive waste. By 2018, all the SRS facilities needed to process the Cold War radioactive waste should be doing just that. At last, radioactive waste that has been accumulating since 1955 can be vitrified into an inert glass and encased in stainless steel — a configuration that will endure towards eternity.

The bottom line is that in the near future, the radioactive waste stored in leaking 50-year-old underground tanks and characterized by the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control as the “greatest environmental risk to South Carolina” could be eliminated.

However, there is no certainty that this will happen on schedule — for reasons that are political, not technical. Congress allocates SRS woefully insufficient funding to process this waste. SRS never criticizes its budget, but under careful questioning, one hears that the budget is “adequate” but that much more could be done with additional funding. For example, right now, the Defense Waste Processing Facility is operating at approximately 25 percent of its capacity. The reason: minimal funding. SRS expects the Salt Waste Processing Facility will have to settle for similarly minimal funding and similarly limited operational capabilities. Thus extending the risk to South Carolina by decades, and increasing the life-cycle costs, as well.

Other DOE sites are not even close to getting their stabilization facilities up and running, yet they get more federal dollars than SRS. I believe it would be more efficient to fully fund the SRS waste disposition program until all the SRS waste is vitrified, and then fund the other, lagging programs. For that to happen, the citizens and elected officials at all levels of our government need to make it clear to the Energy Department and Congress that we expect much more funding than Congress has been willing to put into the SRS.

SRS has done its job: It has gotten an entire waste-processing system working to immobilize dangerous radioactivity. It is up to us, the citizens of South Carolina, to ensure that Congress understands that we expect these amazing facilities to be fully funded, so we at last can say that the “greatest environmental risk to South Carolina” no longer exists.

Chair, S.C. Governor’s Nuclear Advisory Council

Aiken

This story was originally published May 18, 2015 at 7:40 PM.