The Savannah River Site’s HB Line facility is located on top of the H Canyon chemical separations facility. (Photo: DOE)
The Department of Energy has announced that workers at its Savannah River Site in South Carolina recently removed legacy uranium materials from the site’s HB Line as part of an effort to clear the facility of its inventory of legacy nuclear materials. The removed legacy uranium was originally produced by the Y-12 National Security Complex at Oak Ridge, Tenn.
Located on top of Savannah River’s H Canyon, the HB Line was built in the early 1980s to support the production of plutonium-238 for the nation’s deep space exploration program and is the only chemical processing facility of its kind in the DOE complex. The line was also used to recover legacy materials stored in H Canyon and, more recently, to make plutonium oxide, a nonweapons usable form of plutonium.
In 2020, the HB Line was placed in a reversible safe shutdown status, a move that was expected to save the DOE approximately $40 million a year. Since then, work at the facility has been focused on three tasks: de-inventorying and flushing the facility’s product and cold chemical lines, dispositioning legacy plutonium and uranium materials stored and previously used at the facility, and laying up support systems no longer needed.
Quotable: “While most of the material has been de-inventoried from the HB Line facility, a small number of unique and hard-to-disposition items remain,” said Savannah River Nuclear Solutions operations manager Marty Ogden. “One group of these items was legacy uranium from the Y-12 uranium facility sent to SRS around 2008. Due to the unique material makeup of this group of items and competing missions in HB Line, this material has been in safe storage in the facility since its arrival.”
Ogden added that the removal of the Y-12 material completes one of the more challenging efforts associated with the removal of the remaining items out of the facility. “Now that this material is gone, we are much closer to a full de-inventory state,” he said.
Further plans: The Y-12 materials were transferred to Savannah River National Laboratory at SRS for their use in furthering development of plans to disposition other similar items at the site.
According to the DOE, the transfer was a complex process that involved creating new training and close coordination was needed between SRNS and SRNL to ensure the safety of the workers and the environment.
