Pantex Plant to store more nuclear materials produced at Los Alamos lab

By AARON DAVIS
Posted Aug 16, 2016 at 7:21 PM

The Pantex Plant located 17 miles northeast of Amarillo will store nuclear materials produced at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico after plans to build a 31,000-square-foot storage vault were scrapped in an effort to cut costs, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office released earlier this month.

The GAO report called into question the savings stated in the National Nuclear Security Administration’s report on the proposed Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement facility.

The facility, which would provide analysis in support of plutonium pit production at Los Alamos, was intended to include underground vaults to store the nuclear material. A plutonium pit, or core, is “the heart” of a nuclear weapon, according to the Pantex website.

Within the report, a Los Alamos contractor representative stated the planned nuclear material storage vault was eliminated and existing storage at the Pantex Plant would be used as a “long-term vault for storing material used and generated at Los Alamos.”

“The big vault they were planning was to give them freedom to do a lot of different things,” said Greg Mello, executive director of the Los Alamos Study Group. “It would have handled overflow from both (manufacturing and analytical chemistry) facilities, but Los Alamos’ plans, which are NNSA’s plans, are in flux.”

Los Alamos has an anticipated production capacity of up to 80 plutonium pits a year, as defined by the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act.

Pantex had been authorized as “interim” storage for up to 20,000 pits until the now-scrapped Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, or MOX, facility at the NNSA’s Savannah River site was finished, according to documentation explaining plutonium pit storage on the Pantex website,

The authorization for increased storage capacity of up to 20,000 pits was agreed to in 1997 by then-Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary.

In February, the Obama Administration announced plans to scrap the multibillion dollar MOX facility near Aiken, S.C., which would have converted plutonium from dismantled nuclear bombs into fuel.

With increased production of plutonium pits at Los Alamos and the uncertainty behind their disposal, the impact on the Pantex Plant’s storage capacity is unclear.

According to Globe-News files, Pantex was said to have more than 14,000 pits in sealed drums in 2007. Pantex began increasing its plutonium storage after safety and environmental concerns halted plutonium production in 1989 at the former Rocky Flats plant in Colorado. The federal government began secretly shipping thousands of plutonium pits here and later conducted an environmental impact statement to expand storage here.

Normally, the NNSA evaluates the impact of operations at Pantex, including plutonium pit storage in what is called a site-wide environmental impact statement. There has not been an environmental impact statement issued at the Pantex Plant since 1996.

“Here you have the NNSA site with the most weapons-grade plutonium, a dramatically increasing mission in weapons production, yet the old site-wide environmental impact statement dates back to 1996,” said Jay Coghlan, director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico. “I would assert that an environmental statement is long overdue, whether we are approaching the cap on storage at Pantex or not.”

The last Supplemental Analysis, which evaluates every five years whether a site-wide environmental impact statement is needed, was issued by the NNSA in November 2012. At that time, the report concluded that ”... those few impacts that exceed the bounds of the (impact statement) do not result in substantial changes... nor do they present significant new circumstances or information relative to environmental concerns.”