Aiken, South Carolina — A team of engineers and scientists from federal contractors and national laboratories in the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Environmental Management (EM) have been nationally recognized as “Heroes of Chemistry” for making the world better through their hard work, ingenuity, creativity and perseverance.
The American Chemical Society (ACS) recognized the seven-person team representing Savannah River Mission Completion (SRMC). Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL), Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), and DOE were awarded for their integrated efforts in developing and deploying the first separation chemistry to clean up millions of gallons of radioactive waste through the Salt Waste Treatment Facility (SWPF) at EM’s Savannah River Site (SRS). SRMC is EM’s liquid waste contractor at SRS.
The winning team included SRMC vice president and chief engineer Tom Burns, SRMC nuclear safety officer and director of engineering integration Cliff Conner, former SRNL actinide and separation science director Samuel Fink, former SRNL senior consulting scientist David Hobbs, SRMC technical advisory manager Ryan Lenci, the late ANL engineer Ralph Leonard, ORNL corporate fellow Bruce Moyer, and former DOE Savannah River salt treatment senior program manager Patricia Suggs.
The ACS Heroes of Chemistry Award recognizes the role of industrial chemical scientists and their companies in developing successful commercial products that incorporate chemistry for the benefit of humanity.
From initial flowsheet development to the selection and implementation of new chemical processes, the winning team members demonstrated both leadership and technical expertise that contributed to the long-term success and innovative science of the SWPF project.
“The success of this process reflects one of the most successful teamworks between national laboratories and industrial contractors, enabling the Department of Energy to complete the safe disposal of waste from the 1950s through current operations. So many researchers and engineers from a variety of partners contributed to this success,” Fink said.
About 33 million gallons of radioactive waste remain at SRS, a byproduct of Cold War-era weapons manufacturing, space exploration and scientific experiments, stored in two tank farms.
Thanks to the ingenuity of these awardees, SWPF is successfully serving as the primary facility for treating the remaining tank waste at SRS.
The SWPF separates and concentrates the highly radioactive portions of the tank waste (mainly cesium, strontium and actinides) from the less radioactive salt solution. Once the separation process is complete, the concentrated highly radioactive waste is sent to a nearby Defense Waste Processing Facility, where it is secured in glass and stored in stainless steel containers on-site until a federal repository can be established.
Burns said the winning team has few peers in developing a new nuclear chemistry process at test-tube scale and then successfully implementing that process at full scale in a nuclear facility.
“It is an incredible honor to receive the Heroes of Chemistry Award from the American Chemical Society,” Burns said. “The recipients have dedicated decades to discovering, developing and deploying separation chemistry for salt waste treatment plants, a process that benefits human health, the environment and safety.”
SRNL has played a key role in the development and deployment of this complex technology from its inception. In addition to coordinating research with partner national laboratories and universities, SRNL led the development of strontium and actinide removal technology and the maturation of an engineering-scale filtration process.
Hobbs expressed his appreciation for the efforts of his SRNL colleagues and many collaborators at universities, national laboratories and industry partners who contributed greatly to the success of the strontium and actinide separation process.
Central to their success was groundbreaking solvent extraction chemistry developed at ORNL.
Supported by DOE’s Basic Energy Sciences and EM programs, ORNL’s Moyer led the chemical development of the cesium extraction process, starting with the basic principles of solvent extraction. In 2008, the mature process began operating at pilot scale at SRS, removing cesium from millions of gallons of legacy nuclear waste. The process received a Secretary of Energy Award in 2013.
“I am honored to be one of the American Chemical Society’s recipients for their significant contributions to reducing nuclear waste,” Moyer said. “The incredible teamwork underlying this success, from science to implementation, is the epitome of the Department of Energy.”
-Contributing authors: Colleen Hart, Dawn Levy and Scott Shaw