U.S. Department of Energy Office of Environmental Management team members at the Savannah River Site (SRS) recently replaced equipment essential to operations in the H Canyon chemical separations facility following more than six months of research, troubleshooting and coordination.
Office of Environmental Management
July 30, 2024
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AIKEN, S.C. — U.S. Department of Energy Office of Environmental Management team members at the Savannah River Site (SRS) recently replaced equipment essential to operations in the H Canyon chemical separations facility following more than six months of research, troubleshooting and coordination.
The General Purpose Evaporator is used to help concentrate low-level radioactive waste from various sources in the canyon, including sump material, leaks, lab waste and rainwater.
“In November 2023, the General Purpose Evaporator lost vacuum, making it inoperable,” said Regina Marquez, the evaporator design authority engineer for Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS), the site’s management and operations contractor. “Finding the cause of vacuum loss proved to be a six-month troubleshooting effort involving testing several pieces of equipment, tanks and hundreds of feet of piping.”
The evaporator is original to H Canyon, which was built in the early 1950s. Due to the size and number of potential points of failure in the approximately 75-year-old, massive evaporator system, a calculated method for troubleshooting was necessary.
H Canyon worked with employees of Savannah River Mission Completion (SRMC), the site’s liquid waste contractor, to ensure the Effluent Treatment Facility (ETF) could take the unprocessed evaporator material and evaporate it for H Canyon temporarily. ETF treats low-level radioactive wastewater and generally receives waste from the evaporator that, during its normal operations, has already been through an evaporation process. Since the ETF also has evaporators, the facility’s personnel changed some processing parameters to evaporate the waste in the evaporator’s stead.
A view of the original condenser being removed at the H Canyon chemical separations facility at Savannah River Site.
The evaporator’s vacuum issue was determined to be a tube failure in the condenser, requiring a condenser replacement.
“We discovered we already had a spare condenser that was an exact match to the model we were replacing in a no-longer used facility, the F Canyon chemical separations facility, onsite,” Marquez said.
Replacing the 10,000-pound condenser, which sits in a contaminated area, was not a small task. Workers detached overhead piping, cooling water lines and asbestos-containing gaskets to remove the old condenser, which was then lifted from the evaporator system by the largest crane onsite and prepared for disposal. They also used that crane to set in place the new condenser.
The new condenser is shown ready for installation at the H Canyon chemical separations facility at the Savannah River Site.
“This equipment replacement is a testament to how SRNS employees come together as a team to accomplish even the most difficult tasks,” said SRNS President and CEO Dennis Carr. “Congratulations to the team for a job well done, and, most importantly, a job accomplished safely.”
H Canyon is the only operating, production-scale, radiologically shielded chemical separations facility in the United States. H Canyon dissolves spent nuclear fuel and disposes of it through the site’s liquid waste program.
-Contributor: Lindsey MonBarren
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