The National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) Surplus Plutonium Disposition project has reached Critical Decision 1 (CD-1), paving the way for the agency to begin procurement on the long-awaited replacement for the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
The project hit the milestone on Dec. 19, a spokesperson for the semiautonomous Department of Energy branch wrote in a Wednesday email. The project will cost between $448 million and $620 million to build and operate and has been earmarked for Savannah River’s management and operations contractor, the Fluor-led Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, the spokesperson wrote.
The Surplus Plutonium Disposition project at Savannah River is one cog in the broader, multi-site Surplus Plutonium Disposition program that eventually will remove 34 metric tons of weapon-usable plutonium from the U.S. nuclear stockpile.
The South Carolina portion of the project will use three glove-boxes to combine an inert material known as stardust with weapon-usable plutonium declared surplus to defense needs after the end of the Cold War. The resulting mixture will be buried deep underground at DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.
The Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico will contribute to the project by blending any plutonium metal earmarked for disposal into plutonium oxide. The lab will convert metal to oxide in its Plutonium Facility, putting the disposition mission in competition with the NNSA’s drive to produce war-usable plutonium pits — fissile nuclear-weapon cores — in the same facility beginning in 2024.
The NNSA plans to complete the Surplus Plutonium Disposition facility by 2028 at Savannah River’s K-Area, with operations continuing into the 2040s. Congress appropriated nearly $80 million for the project in 2020, as requested. The money will go toward procuring the glove boxes and preparing K-Area for their installation.
The NNSA canceled the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility in October 2018, two years after officially asking Congress for permission to shutter the partially completed plant. The MFFF was supposed to convert surplus plutonium into mixed oxide fuel to be burned in commercial nuclear reactors. Instead, the NNSA plans to convert the plant into a factory capable of annually producing 50 pits by 2030.
The converted plant will be called the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility, and the NNSA has acknowledged it will be a “challenge” to produce 50 pits a year there only 10 years from now.
The Surplus Plutonium Disposition program would cost about $20 billion over its life — 2019 through 2050 — compared with about $50 billion for MFFF, according to a 2018 report by NNSA’s nominally independent Cost Estimating and Program Evaluation Office.
