Workers fill the 500th container with LEU solution.

An operator practices to become waste-certified.

An operator in one of HB Line's control rooms.

H Area Completion

Within the H Canyon facility, the mission of this project is to stabilize and disposition legacy nuclear materials, including foreign and domestic research reactor fuel.

H Canyon was constructed in the early 1950s and began operations in 1955. The building is called a canyon because of its long rectangular shape and the continuous trench that contains the process vessels. It is approximately 1,000 feet long with several levels to accommodate the various stages of material stabilization, including control rooms to monitor overall equipment and operating processes, equipment and piping gallery for solution transport, storage, and disposition, and unique overhead bridge cranes to support overall process operations. All work is remotely controlled, and employees are further protected from radiation by thick concrete walls.

Nuclear material (fuel rods, oxides, etc.) is transferred from designated storage areas from across SRS to H Canyon, converted to solution and transferred through various process stages where uranium, neptunium and plutonium are separated. Contaminants are removed, and the product is purified. Waste is transferred to the site’s high-level waste storage tanks for eventual vitrification in the Defense Waste Processing Facility at SRS.

In 1992, the Department of Energy (DOE) concluded that recovery of enriched uranium for reuse in weapons programs was no longer justified because of the reduction in the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile. However, there was an inventory of highly enriched uranium fuels and solutions in various stages of the SRS process.

Between December 1995 and October 1997, DOE issued a series of decisions to resume chemical separation operations to stabilize and manage most of the remaining inventory of highly enriched uranium (HEU) materials at SRS. DOE also concluded that H Canyon was also to be used to support stabilization of Np-237 stored in H Canyon and a number of plutonium solids currently stored in F Area vaults.

At the direction of DOE, in October 1997 H Canyon began recovery of U-235. The resulting solution, also called “highly enriched uranium,” or HEU, is being blended with natural uranium (NU) to form low-enriched uranium (LEU), which is suitable for use in commercial nuclear power reactors. In July 2003, the first LEU shipment was sent to the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). TVA will convert the LEU to fuel for their power reactors to generate electricity. Shipments to TVA are expected to continue until 2007.

The stored Np-237 will be converted to a solid in HB Line, beginning in August 2004, and shipped to another DOE site for future use in the Pu-238 program.

Plutonium dispositioned through H Area is transferred to Liquid Waste Operations for eventual immobilization in DWPF glass.