[DOE LETTERHEAD]
April 28, 2003
The Honorable John T. Conway
Chairman
Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board
625 Indiana Avenue, NW, Suite 700
Washington, D.C. 20004-2901
Dear Mr. Chairman:
The purpose of this letter is to forward to
you Revision 1 of the Savannah River Site (SRS) High-Level Waste Tank
In-Service Inspection Program (ISIP) (Enclosure 1) as requested in your June
11, 2002, letter. This revised document
incorporates the previous commitment to inspect all of the Type III/IIIA waste
tanks and addresses your concerns regarding tank selection criteria and
acceptance criteria for inspection results.
Additionally, following discussions with your staff, the Department has
decided to further revise the attached ISIP schedule in order to complete
examination of all of the Type III/IIIA waste tanks by the end of 2007. A revised ISIP schedule will be provided to
you by July 21, 2003. The Department is
committed to adjusting the SRS ISIP as necessary, should inspection results
indicate the existence of or potential for accelerated degradation in the Type
III/IIIA waste tanks.
Also enclosed is a copy of a review
(Enclosure 2) undertaken as a comparison of ISIPs for the Office of River
Protection (ORP) and SRS. The review
compares the two respective ISIPs with the Guidelines for Development of
Structural Integrity Programs for DOE High-level Waste Storage Tanks,
BNL-52527, January 1997. These
guidelines were developed by a committee of experts known as the Tank
Structural Integrity Panel (TSIP), and are recognized in DOE G 435.1 as
providing an acceptable process for establishing a high-level waste tank
structural integrity program. Both
sites use the TSIP guidelines as the technical basis for their ISIPs. Both the ORP and the SRS ISIP conform to the
TSIP guidelines as detailed in Enclosure 2.
If you have further questions, please
contact me at (202) 586-7709.
Sincerely,
Chief Operating Officer
Office of Environmental Management
cc:
Mark Whitaker, S-3.1