The Savannah River Site in South Carolina has processed more than 10 million gallons of liquid radioactive waste in its Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF), the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management has announced.

The Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina recently began onboarding 24 graduates from Denmark Technical College in Denmark, S.C., as part of SRS’s Production Operator Apprentice School.

Holston

Savannah River Mission Completion (SRMC) and the charitable educational organization Citizens for Nuclear Technology Awareness (CNTA) have announced that Micah Holston, a student at Kennesaw State University, is the winner of the 2024 Robert Maher Memorial Scholarship.

The $5,000 scholarship is sponsored by SRMC, the liquid waste contractor for the Department of Energy at the Savannah River Site.

The winner: Holston, a senior from Marietta, Ga., is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in physics and political science with minors in nuclear engineering, math, and international affairs. CNTA executive director Allison Hamilton Molnar said the organization is proud to award this scholarship to such a deserving student.

Workers at the Savannah River Site have recently completed the replacement of a piece of equipment that the Department of Energy said in a July 31 press release is “essential for operations in the site’s H Canyon chemical separations capable facility.”

Savannah River Mission Completion (SRMC), the liquid waste contractor at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site, recently presented a $10,000 check to Voorhees University to fund science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) scholarships.

A new program at the Savannah River Site is educating workers on everyday workplace hazards through a new hands-on, peer-led mobile field course.

The Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina will begin a leak tightness test on what it called “the fourth megavolume saltstone disposal unit (SDU)” at the site.

Three college interns from the Savannah River Site were the keynote speakers at a recent Up & Atom Breakfast hosted by Citizens for Nuclear Technology Awareness (CNTA). The breakfast was held at Newberry Hall in Aiken, S.C.

Two diversion boxes were covered with concrete to permanently close them from future use. Top, one of the boxes is shown prior to it being entombed in concrete. Bottom, the diversion box after workers placed concrete over and around the structure. (Photo: DOE)

Two previously radioactive structures have been successfully entombed at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina. The DOE’s Office of Environmental Management and the Savannah River Mission Completion (SRMC), the DOE’s liquid waste contractor at SRS, placed concrete over and around two concrete structures—called diversion boxes—that contain a series of connection points that allowed high-level radioactive waste to be transferred from one tank or facility to another.

The two boxes have been out of service for more than 30 years. As part of the closure process, both structures were previously filled with grout, rendering them inoperable.

The boxes were the first ancillary structures closed in this way under SRMC’s liquid waste contract. They are located in the F Tank Farm, a grouping of large underground waste-storage tanks. The liquid waste program at SRS has closed eight of the site’s 51 massive waste tanks by filling them with cementitious grout.

Twenty-three students in the third cohort of the Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS) Nuclear Operator Apprenticeship Program graduated recently following their completion of the Nuclear Fundamentals Certificate curriculum at Aiken Technical College (ATC) in South Carolina. The class was the largest ever of operator apprentices to graduate from the program. Those graduates who meet all employment requirements are eligible for hire at the Savannah River Site.

Savannah River Mission Completion (SRMC), the radioactive liquid waste contractor at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site, is optimizing some equipment maintenance at the Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF). The facility traditionally uses centrifugal contactors in the solvent extraction process, and its laboratory uses manipulators to handle process samples and equipment within its radioactive cell. The equipment requires periodic maintenance and rebuilding.