This month, the Energy Department will begin preparing some 6 metric tons of weapon-usable plutonium at the Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C., for disposal at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., a senior agency official said last week at the ExchangeMonitor’s 2016 RadWaste Summit.
“We’re going to start the downblending activities this month,” Frank Marcinowski, associate principal deputy assistant energy secretary for regulatory and policy affairs, said in his summit keynote on Sept. 6. “We’re going to continue to go through that, that stockpile at the site. And we’ll have to see what the appropriate time for that is to queue in the WIPP shipping schedule.”
The 6 tons of plutonium headed to WIPP is part of a cache of 13 metric tons of weapon-usable material. The portion headed to WIPP is in non-pit form, meaning that although it is suitable for a bomb, it is not in the right shape to be plugged into a nuclear warhead. About 7 tons stored at DOE’s Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas, is in pit form.
On March 29, DOE made official a decision an extended environmental assessment had made all but certain in December: that the non-pit material would be diluted at Savannah River and mixed with concrete for eventual interment at WIPP.
In a February budget briefing, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said downblended material from the 6-ton cache should start arriving at WIPP in the early 2020s. DOE has not settled on a disposal method for the remaining 7 tons of plutonium that is in pit form.
None of the 13 tons of weapon-usable plutonium in the cache discussed by Marcinowski is part of the 34 metric tons of excess weapon-usable plutonium covered that was, under an arms-reduction pact with Russia finalized in 2010, to be turned into fuel for commercial nuclear plants in the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility under construction at Savannah River. The Obama administration wants to cancel the plant, over the objections of South Carolina’s congressional delegation and the parent companies of prime contractor CB&I AREVA MOX Services.
Congress has so far not agreed to the Obama administration’s request. A draft 2017 DOE budget bill that died on the House floor in May forbade the administration from canceling MOX. A draft Senate budget bill approved in April left the door open for cancellation, without expressly agreeing with the administration’s plan.
