Date Published: July 10, 2006   

Startup of second nuclear facility begins at Savannah River Site

The Associated Press

Operations have begun at a second facility at the Savannah River Site to immobilize nuclear waste in glass logs, federal officials announced Monday.

The first glass waste storage building used for the last decade is nearing capacity. The new facility has the capacity to store 2,340 canisters and shouldn't fill until 2015, U.S. Department of Energy officials said.

The construction of the second facility was begun two years ago by the Department of Energy. It was completed over two months ahead of schedule and $8 million under the total project cost, officials said.

There are roughly 36 million gallons of radioactive waste at SRS left over from Cold War-era bomb making. About 34 million gallons of the waste stored in the tanks is made up of salt waste, which the agency considers low-activity and can be left behind at the site. The high-level radioactive waste is converted into the glass logs.

The Department of Energy has said a facility to separate the high- and low-level radioactive nuclear waste stored in underground tanks at the site will be delayed until 2011. In March, the SRS Citizens Advisory Board's waste management committee wrote a letter to the federal government saying that construction delays for a nuclear waste processing facility at the site could cost taxpayers $1 billion.