Personnel at the Savannah River Site should wrap up commissioning of transuranic waste characterization equipment by March, in time to get a shipment of proliferation-resistant plutonium-oxide mixture shipped to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant next summer, a site spokesperson said Wednesday.
Testing and certification of the transuranic waste-characterization equipment at the site’s recently completed K-Area storage pad started in July, the site spokesperson said. The site started storing transuranic waste bound for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) on the pad on June 2. The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)-funded pad at the South Carolina site was built and cleared for operations on May 27, according to the spokesperson.
NNSA’s ongoing Material Disposition program at Savannah River Site’s K-Area is the forerunner of the Surplus Plutonium Disposition program that will eventually immobilize 34 metric tons of surplus weapon-usable plutonium by converting plutonium metal to plutonium oxide at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, mixing it with concrete-like grout at Savannah River and burying the mixture deep underground at WIPP. The process is generically called dilute and dispose and replaces the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, cancelled in 2018, as NNSA’s main plutonium disposal program.
In the meantime, the Department of Energy is legally bound, as part of a 2020 settlement that sent some $600 million South Carolina’s way from the federal judgement fund, to start processing some 9.5 tons of plutonium that’s already stored at the site in Aiken County, near the Georgia border.
Earlier this summer, K-Area ramped up to four shifts from two at K-Area’s plutonium processing glovebox. When the Surplus Plutonium Disposition program is in full swing, around 2028 or so, the NNSA plans have three more custom-made gloveboxes at the site, two of which would be staffed in the course of normal operations; the third would be a spare.
