The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) said Tuesday it plans to soon start work on a South Carolina plutonium disposal project — operations that will consume about one-third of the amount Congress appropriated for the project in the current 2020 federal budget year.
This site preparation work for the Surplus Plutonium Disposition project at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina will cost roughly $28 million, the semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear weapons agency stated in a press release. Congress appropriated nearly $80 million for the project in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30.
The release does not say when this work will begin.
Site preparation includes demolition and security modifications at Savannah River Site’s K-Area Complex: a Hazard Category 1 nuclear facility where the agency stores 11.5 metric tons of surplus plutonium, along with other special nuclear material. The project will eventually add three plutonium-handling glove boxes to K-Area: two to process plutonium and one as a spare.
The NNSA is seeking nearly $150 million in 2021 to finish the design of, and long-lead procurement sfor, the Surplus Plutonium Disposition project: nearly $70 million more than the 2020 appropriation. The project is one part of the broader, multi-site Surplus Plutonium Disposition program that eventually aims to remove 34 metric tons of weapon-usable plutonium from the U.S. nuclear stockpile.
The NNSA has yet to formally approve a disposal pathway for all 34 metric tons of this plutonium, which was once slated to be converted into commercial nuclear reactor fuel using the Savannah River Site’s partially built Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility. The agency now plans to convert that facility, canceled in 2018, into a plant capable of annually producing 50 fissile nuclear warhead cores called plutonium pits by 2030.
Under the nationwide Surplus Plutonium Disposal program, the NNSA notionally plans eventually to chemically dilute the 34 metric tons of plutonium using facilities at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and Savannah River. It would then blend the diluted plutonium with an inert material called stardust — the exact composition of which is classified — and dispose of the mixture deep underground at the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP).
“It is technically feasible to disposition all the surplus plutonium in storage at Savannah River Site via the dilute and dispose approach,” an NNSA spokesperson wrote in an email this week.
Beside Savannah River, the NNSA stores surplus plutonium that may one day be targeted for dilute and dispose at the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas. Some of the agency’s surplus plutonium is in the form of pits: the cores of nuclear weapons.
Lawmakers from South Carolina worry that tons of diluted plutonium mixture from the proposed disposition program could remain at Savannah River indefinitely, because there is no room for it at WIPP.
Lawmakers from New Mexico have said Congress and the president would have to change the 1992 law that established the underground disposal site in order to accommodate all the waste that DOE plans to put there. WIPP may hold a maximum of 176,000 cubic meters of defense-related transuranic waste: elements heavier than uranium, typically plutonium, and material or equipment contaminated by those elements.
Meanwhile, South Carolina has successfully sued the NNSA under a federal law that requires the agency to remove plutonium shipped to the state for mixed-oxide conversion. The NNSA trucked 500 kilograms of plutonium to the Nevada National Security Site some time in 2018 and transported another 500 kilograms out of the state after that. The agency has not confirmed that tranche of plutonium wound up at the Pantex Plant, as the agency previously announced it would.
While South Carolina and the state are in settlement talks, Columbia has not ruled out further legal action based on the same law that already got 1 ton of plutonium booted out of Savannah River. Absent an agreement outside of court, that law would require the NNSA to by 2022 remove all the plutonium it shipped to South Carolina for mixed-oxide conversion.
The Surplus Plutonium Disposition project at the Savannah River Site reached the Critical Design 1 milestone on Dec. 19, after a review panel approved the NNSA’s final design for the project. The agency says it will start operating the project in 2028 and continue into the 2040s.
The NNSA estimates the Savannah River Surplus Plutonium Disposition project will cost between $448 million and $620 million to build and operate. For now, the money for the project is flowing through Savannah River’s management and operations contractor, the Fluor-led Savannah River Nuclear Solutions.
