A metric ton of plutonium once slated to be de-weaponized forever would instead be used to help the Department of Energy manufacture new nuclear-weapon cores next decade, the agency confirmed this week.
Earlier this year, the Department of Energy and its semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) decided that “a fraction of the plutonium that’s at South Carolina, close to 1 metric ton but not substantially more than that, could be re-purposed and not considered to be surplus plutonium anymore,” federal attorney Daniel Tenny said Sept. 27, about five minutes into an oral argument on the NNSA’s behalf before the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va.
In a statement to Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor this week, the agency confirmed that this 1 metric ton of plutonium — part of a large tranche declared surplus to national defense needs after the end of the Cold War in the 1990s — was redesignated as “for defense production use” in May. In July, the agency earmarked the material for a one-way a trip to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where it would be used to help make plutonium pits: the softball-shaped cores of most modern nuclear weapons.
The metric ton of fissile material provisionally on its way out of the Palmetto State is not currently in pit form, the NNSA told NS&D Monitor. The plutonium must be shipped out of Savannah River by Jan. 1, 2020, if the NNSA does not prevail in its pending appeal of a December order from the U.S. District Court for South Carolina. The state of South Carolina secured the decision as part of a lawsuit filed against the DOE branch in 2016. Tenny’s Sept. 27 oral argument was part of the federal appeal of that decision.
On its way to Los Alamos, the metric ton of no-longer-surplus plutonium could make stops at the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas, and the Nevada National Security Site some 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. There, the material would be stored until needed for pit work, and repackaged as necessary. Nevada’s governor has vocally opposed such a layover, as has Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.), who has made opposition to storing nuclear materials in the Silver State a campaign cornerstone in his close re-election race this year.
The NNSA shipped about 10 metric tons of plutonium to South Carolina since 2002, the state wrote in an Aug. 21, 2017 filing with the U.S. District Court for South Carolina. Now, the state is fighting to get that plutonium out, even as it fights to save the thing that brought the material into the state in the first place: the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) being built at Savannah River by contractor MOX Services.
The contractor, then called Shaw AREVA MOX Services, broke ground on the MFFF in 2007. The plant was supposed to turn surplus plutonium into fuel for power plants, but it ran over budget and behind schedule after a series of changes to the overall plutonium disposal mission. By 2016, the NNSA asked Congress to cancel that plant and approve a different plutonium disposal option at Savannah River.
That caused an uproar in South Carolina, prompting the influential U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R), and later South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster (R), to step up efforts to save the plant — and the thousands direct and indirect jobs it represents. Graham began inserting funding for the plant into must-pass spending bills, and McMaster sicced state Attorney General Alan Wilson on the NNSA in federal court to make sure the agency spent that money only on the plutonium disposal mission.
Publicly, these key South Carolina stakeholders have rejected a de facto compromise offer from the NNSA: turning the MFFF into a new factory that would be responsible for making 50 of the 80 pits the Donald Trump administration asked the agency to produce each year starting in 2030. The NNSA says it needs new pits for future refurbishments of existing U.S. nuclear weapons. The Departments of Energy and Defense have thrown their weight behind a redundant pit-production complex that includes one factory in South Carolina and one at Los Alamos.
The Department of Energy has not manufactured war-ready pits on an industrial scale since the Rocky Flats production site near Denver was shut down in the wake of a 1989 FBI raid that uncovered criminal environmental misconduct at that Cold War-vintage plant.
So, South Carolina has rejected a pit mission for now, leaving the state in the awkward position of simultaneously pressing the courts to save MFFF while forcing the NNSA to remove plutonium brought to the state because of MFFF.
The 2016 lawsuit now on appeal hinged on federal law that required the NNSA to ship 1 metric ton of plutonium out of state by Jan. 1, 2016, if the MFFF had not started converting the material into commercial reactor fuel by 2014.
In a separate lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in May the state sought and received a temporary injunction that blocked the NNSA from winding down the MFFF’s plutonium-disposal mission. The agency has asked that the injunction be lifted.
The MFFF was supposed to turn 34 metric tons of surplus weapon-usable plutonium into commercial reactor fuel as part of a materials-disposal pact with Russia — the seemingly moribund Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement — that required Moscow to purge its stockpile of the same amount of plutonium. Russia in 2016 unilaterally suspended its participation in the accord, though both it and the U.S. maintain they will still dispose of 34 metric tons of plutonium.
The NNSA refused to say this week whether the metric ton of plutonium to be moved out of South Carolina was part of a 34 metric-ton tranche once destined for conversion in the MFFF.
However, the agency did tell NS&D Monitor that the material was not part of a separate 13.1-metric-ton tranche of surplus plutonium slated in part for disposal at Savannah River. The NNSA also said the government “remains dedicated to disposing of a full 34 metric tons of excess plutonium to meet U.S. nonproliferation commitments.”
At deadline Friday, the Fourth Circuit had not decided whether to reverse the District Court’s order to remove 1 metric ton of plutonium from South Carolina’s borders.