The Energy Department on Wednesday made official its decision to send 6 metric tons of nuclear weapon-usable plutonium from the Savannah River Site (SRS) near Aiken, S.C., to the agency’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M.
The official stamp of approval arrives a day before the fourth and final Nuclear Security Summit convenes in Washington, D.C., and a week after South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley publicly called on Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz to halt a 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 on Tuesday — but posted online Wednesday — 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.”
An NNSA spokesperson on Wednesday confirmed that included the 331-kilogram shipment from Japan.
The plutonium now will be diluted at SRS, blended into a concrete-based mixture, and prepared for permanent interment at WIPP. This, according to the NNSA fact sheet, “will require the installation of new equipment at the site [SRS].”
Moniz said in February the 6 tons of diluted plutonium would probably get to WIPP early in the next decade.
Tuesday’s record of decision caps a process that began 2007, when DOE announced it would study the environmental impacts of disposing of 13.1 metric tons of weapons-useable plutonium.
The 6 metric tons now officially headed to WIPP are the non-pit portion of that tranche. DOE had fewer than 6 tons of non-pit material on hand when it embarked on the 2007 study, but padded its estimates to allow for the possibility the department would acquire more of the stuff between the commencement and the conclusion of the research effort.
In the voluminous Surplus Plutonium Disposition Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement that Tuesday’s record of decision made official, DOE said it evaluated disposal options for more weapons-usable, non-pit material than it already had “to allow for the possibility that DOE may, in the future, identify additional quantities of surplus plutonium that could be processed for disposition.”
The agency said in the document that “future sources of additional surplus plutonium could include plutonium quantities recovered from foreign locations.”
During a Capitol Hill hearing earlier this month, Klotz said a separate 34-metric-ton tranche of plutonium — which includes the other 7 tons from the 13.1 tons addressed by the 2007 study — is also to be downblended and sent to WIPP.
