Savannah River Site’s H-Canyon Facility: “A National Asset with New Mission

For over fifty years, the H Canyon facility, including HB Line, has performed remotely operated radiochemical separations of irradiated targets to produce materials for national defense. Although the materials production mission has ended, the facility continues to play an important role in the stabilization and safe disposition of proliferable nuclear materials. H Canyon offers a unique combination of capabilities, equipment, and infrastructure that is not available anywhere else in the United States or internationally. The facility can receive and dissolve irradiated nuclear fuel, separating and recovering many useful products in a series of process cells using existing equipment. The flexibility of the facility design allows for equipment to be replaced or reconfigured accommodating changing process requirements. HB Line contains a series of shielded glovebox lines that allow “hands-on” processing, including purification, solidification, and packaging of smaller quantities of plutonium and other minor actinides or special products. The H Canyon facility has been given new mission direction involving excess plutonium processing, preparation for processing potential vulnerable spent nuclear fuel from wet storage, and research and development of vacuum salt distillation processing.