Later this year and sometime next year, the Savannah River Site will install a crucial pair of upgrades at the H-Canyon chemical separations facility to help site personnel prepare plutonium from a Japanese reactor for on-site solidification and, eventually, deep-geologic disposal elsewhere.
H-Canyon will get a new tank later this year and a new electrolytic dissolver, its third, next year, a spokesperson for site operations contractor Savannah River Nuclear Solutions wrote Tuesday in an email.
With it, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) will be able to immobilize some 350 kilograms of plutonium used in Japan’s Fast Critical Assembly into glass-like cylinders at the site’s Defense Waste Processing Facility. Those cylinders would have to be disposed of at a permanent deep geologic repository, such as the still-unbuilt Yucca Mountain — which the Joe Biden administration won’t build and the Donald Trump administration couldn’t build.
At one point, the Fast Critical Assembly plutonium was part of a 6-metric-ton surplus tranche that was supposed to be blended with concrete-like grout and buried at DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant as part of the agency’s Surplus Plutonium Disposition Program. Most of the plutonium had shipped from Japan by 2016.
H-Canyon needs upgrades to deal with the Fast Critical Assembly plutonium because the fuel from that reactor is clad in stainless steel. The South Carolina chemical separations area is currently set up to dissolve aluminum clad fuel only.
To make room for the new tank and dissolver, Savannah River Nuclear Solutions has been shipping old equipment out of H-Canyon to the site’s Solid Waste Management Facility, the contractor wrote in a recent press release. The contractor hauls the old equipment out of the facility by rail. One such shipment moved out in January, another in April, and a third is supposed to go “later this year,” the spokesperson said.
The Fast Critical Assembly plutonium itself is now stored in Savannah River Site’s K-Area.
The Fluor-led Savannah River Nuclear Solutions will be on the job until at least Sept. 30, and possibly through Sept. 2022. The team is now on its second extension from DOE after taking over site management in 2008. DOE awarded the first extension in 2018. In May, the agency issued a draft request for proposals for a follow-on Savannah River management and operations contract, which could be worth more than $20 billion over 10 years, with options.
Like the current site operations contract, DOE’s Environmental Management office will own the follow on, which will cover some of the NNSA’s nuclear weapons and nonproliferation work.
