Team Replaces Major Equipment at One of a kind Facility at Savannah River Site

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.