NNSA moving on new facility to dispose of plutonium—greens

By George Lobsenz

Already planning to spend billions of dollars on two new plants to build plutonium pits for nuclear warheads, the National Nuclear Security Administration is now moving forward with plans for another costly facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory to dispose of surplus weapons plutonium, environmentalists said Wednesday.

The Los Alamos Study Group (LASG), an Albuquerque-based antinuclear group that closely monitors operations at the New Mexico lab, said the Energy Department’s semi-autonomous nuclear weapons agency has formally approved “critical decision zero”—or CD-0—confirming the “mission need” for a new plutonium processing facility at Los Alamos with an estimated "rough order of magnitude" cost range of $1 billion to $3.4 billion.

The group said NNSA officials approved CD-0 for the new “pit disassembly and processing” facility on July 9, citing an apparently internal announcement at the agency that has not been publicly released.

NNSA officials had no immediate comment on LASG’s disclosure Wednesday, but said they would be responding.

LASG did provide a number of details from the CD-0 approval document it has apparently obtained. The group said the DOE official in overall charge of the new plutonium processing facility is Deputy Energy Secretary David Turk, and that the project is "owned" by Assistant Deputy NNSA Administrator Jessica Halse in the agency’s Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation department.

The group also said that while Los Alamos has nominally been chosen as the location of the facility, NNSA also will consider putting the plant at its Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina or its Pantex plutonium storage and warhead assembly/disassembly plant in Texas, although that appears less likely as the site has never had any plutonium processing operations.

“No specific locations at Los Alamos [for the new plutonium processing facility] were mentioned in the terse CD-0 announcement, which is not publicly available,” LASG said.

The group said CD-0 approval launches a number of planning and design activities, including an analysis of alternatives, an independently-reviewed conceptual design, a funding profile and a strategy for conducting environmental reviews required under the National Environmental Policy Act.

Apparently citing the CD-O approval document, the group said the next step in DOE’s project procurement process—CD-1, when the department formally approves the site of the new facility and a refined price tag— would be completed by fiscal year 2023, and that the project was slated to be completed between fiscal years 2031 to 2035.

The new plutonium processing facility is needed because DOE two years ago cancelled a half-built facility at its Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina that was supposed to dispose of some 34 metric tons of surplus weapons plutonium to meet a 2000 nonproliferation agreement with Russia under which both nations agreed to get rid of that amount of weapons-usable material. Both were expected to convert surplus pits into uranium-plutonium—or mixed oxide (MOX)—fuel for use in commercial power reactors.

DOE spent some $4 billion on the SRS MOX production facility, but ultimately decided it was too expensive to complete. Instead, it now plans to dispose of the plutonium by diluting it at SRS and burying it the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, its underground transuranic waste repository in New Mexico.

At the same time, the department has decided to repurpose the partially completed SRS MOX facility to make plutonium pits for warheads and also plans to build a smaller pit production facility at Los Alamos, saying two sites are needed for that mission to assure redundancy for a critical national security need.

However, with DOE already planning to expand and modernize existing Los Alamos facilities to accommodate pit production, it now needs another facility to carry out the plutonium disposal mission.

LASG noted that DOE nearly a decade ago had plans to build a "pit disassembly and conversion facility" at Los Alamos to provide feed material for the SRS MOX plant. However, the pit disposal facility was cancelled in fiscal year 2012 after an expenditure of $730 million, according to LASG.

DOE at that time announced plans to use some combination of facilities at Los Alamos and SRS to disassemble pits and produce plutonium feed for the MOX facility, but has not advanced that strategy until now.

LASG, which opposes the new plutonium pit facility at Los Alamos, said the decision to build a new plutonium processing facility at Los Alamos was necessary because pit production now was eating up available operational space at PF-4, the decades-old plutonium building at Los Alamos. It noted that a 2019 analysis by the Government Accountability Office revealed that NNSA’s plan to build plutonium pits at PF-4 effectively left no space for plutonium disposal operations.

“With NNSA's May 2018 decision to produce plutonium pits at LANL's PF-4, looming space and safety envelope conflicts in that facility became acute,” LASG said in a press release. “Last month's decision to provide a separate capability flows from those conflicts.”

LASG Director Greg Mello said that finding a location for the new processing facility at Los Alamos will be difficult because of security and other issues.

"It will be interesting to see where NNSA believes this facility could be built at Los Alamos,” he said in a statement. “There is only one possible place: Technical Area-55. All other locations would require a wholly new security perimeter just for starters, which NNSA has said would entail a $1 billion expense in itself. Constructing any such facility at TA-55 is, however, beset with almost insurmountable engineering and logistical challenges.”

Further, Mello said the new project also underlined mounting and unsustainable plutonium costs at NNSA.

"Not counting the cost of this project, NNSA's plutonium modernization and pit production program is going to cost between $32 billion and $40 billion through 2033, when pit production at SRS may come on line,” he said. “This proposed project is just the latest wrinkle in these huge, complex plans, which at Los Alamos' crowded site strain credulity far past the breaking point.

"Given the cost of prior efforts, we expect the cost of this facility — should it proceed — to be much greater than currently estimated,” he added.

Mello also called on DOE to reconsider diluting plutonium for disposal at WIPP, saying it would cause huge new waste streams. He suggested some form of direct disposal at WIPP could be possible, reducing costs and waste issues.