The Energy Department’s decision to officially ship 6 metric tons of diluted weapon-grade plutonium to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., ultimately registered as a pot-sweetener this week as flashier nonproliferation news stole the headlines during the final Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, D.C.
DOE made the decision Tuesday but did not publish or announce the action until Wednesday, a day before the summit began. The move made official what a long-running environmental assessment made all but certain in December: that the agency would mix 6 tons of weapon-usable, non-pit plutonium into a concrete blend, and send the material to WIPP. The material should arrive at WIPP in the early 2020s, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said in February during a DOE budget briefing.
The decision caps a process that began 2007, when DOE announced it would study the environmental impacts of disposing of 13.1 metric tons of weapon-grade material. The disposal method for the other 7.1 metric tons, already in so-called pit form and ready to be plugged into a nuclear weapon, remains uncertain.
News of DOE’s long-awaited signoff first leaked Tuesday morning, when South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley told the Associated Press the agency planned to move the 6 metric tons of plutonium out of the Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C. Haley raised her latest objections to bringing foreign plutonium to the site on March 23, when she asked Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz in writing to halt a 331-kilogram shipment of plutonium to SRS from Japan.
In a fact sheet appended to the official DOE record of decision signed by National Nuclear Safety Administration (NNSA) Administrator Frank Klotz, the agency said the 6 metric tons of plutonium that will eventually be buried at WIPP “includes all plutonium that has been sent to SRS from foreign countries.”
This news, however, quickly fell off the radar as the United Kingdom on Thursday announced it would send 700 kilograms of excess highly enriched uranium from its Dounreay nuclear site in Scotland to an undisclosed U.S. location. In return, the U.K. will get a cache of U.S. uranium that will be turned into medical isotopes that “can be used in radiotherapy to diagnose and treat conditions such as thyroid cancer by weakening or destroying the cancerous cells,” a U.K. press release said.
Despite the much-ballyhooed uranium swap, one long-time nuclear watchdog kept his eye on WIPP.
“I don’t agree with the decision” to put more plutonium in WIPP, Don Hancock, director of the nuclear waste program at the Southwest Research and Information Center in Albuquerque, N.M. “There are several other better alternatives.”
Hancock said WIPP is running out of space, with a long queue of plutonium-contaminated equipment from U.S. facilities already waiting its turn to get into the underground storage facility. The facility already stores some 90,000 square meters of waste. In any case, Hancock said, WIPP by law may accept only U.S. defense plutonium, and not civilian plutonium. The shipment headed to SRS from Japan may include some such material.
The city of Carlsbad, meanwhile, has awaited DOE’s decision with open arms since January, when the municipality passed a resolution welcoming the 6 metric tons of weapon-useble material to WIPP, once the facility reopens.
The facility has been closed since 2014 because of a radiation leak and unrelated underground fire. DOE says WIPP will resume waste storage in December.
The White House is also sticking to its script that 34 metric tons of weapons-grade plutonium, which includes the other 7.1 metric tons from the 2007 study, could be downblended and sent to WIPP. Klotz said as much in congressional testimony in early March.
That, however, would require modifying an arms reduction pact finalized with Russia in 2010, under which the plutonium us supposed to be turned into fuel for commercial reactors at the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility under construction at SRS. The Obama administration proposed canceling that facility in February as part of its fiscal 2017 budget request.
Anton Khlopkov, founding director of the Russian nongovernmental Center for Energy and Security Studies, said at a separate NGO conference held Wednesday that Russia might be amendable to modifying the terms of the arms-control pact to allow for WIPP disposal, but he put the onus squarely on the U.S. to “must make sure that the process first is irreversible and sustainable regardless of budgetary and presidential cycles.”
An earlier version of this story incorrectly said highly enriched uranium from the United Kingdom would be sent to DOE’s Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C. A spokesperson for the National Nuclear Security Administration would not identify the final destination for the U.K. material, but said the uranium will not be sent to the Savannah River Site.
