NNSA Plans to Review Dilute and Disposal Plan for SRS Material

10/23/2020

By Dan Leone

Later this year, the National Nuclear Security Administration will begin a formal review of its program to dispose of the 34 metric tons of plutonium once slated to be recycled into commercial reactor fuel, an agency official said.

It was unclear whether the agency would heed the advice of the National Academies of Sciences and do a comprehensive programmatic environmental impact statement of the decade-spanning Surplus Plutonium Disposition Program, which is supposed to begin later next decade and run until the 2050s or so.

The program aims to permanently deweaponize the 34 metric tons of surplus weapon-usable plutonium that until 2018 was supposed to be turned into fuel for power plants in the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility.

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is “beginning or initiating its [National Environmental Protection Act] analysis for the full 34 metric tons by the end of this calendar year,” Virginia Kay now the director of NNSA’s Office of Material Disposition, told the South Carolina Governor’s Nuclear Advisory Council Friday. “So we would anticipate a notice of intent being out later this calendar year.”

Surplus Plutonium Disposition, or dilute and dispose, involves converting plutonium into plutonium oxide, blending the oxidized plutonium with an inert, classified material once known as stardust, and burying it deep underground at the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.

Savannah River’s part in the process is the mixing, which will happen at the site’s K-Area facility, where DOE’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) is piloting the dilute-and-dispose process in the K-Area Interim Storage glovebox.

That glovebox has processed between 20 and 30 3013 containers worth of weapon-usable plutonium since the EM operation came back online in July, Kay said Friday.

The National Academies of Science, which this year completed a years-long review of the Surplus Plutonium Disposition program, has warned that the multi-site effort to dispose of 34 metric tons of plutonium will tax Savannah River far more than the relatively smaller EM effort, which initially involved a tranche of 6.5 metric tons of plutonium.

Surplus Plutonium Disposition at the Savannah River Site is supposed to start in earnest in 2027 or 2028, Kay said. By then, NNSA will have installed three new gloveboxes so that the NNSA mission does not have to rely on EM’s interim surveillance glovebox.

Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico will downblend the plutonium into oxide and ship it to K-Area, but the high-desert lab’s plutonium handling space, PF-4, is also needed for NNSA’s mission to produce new plutonium pits for future Ground Based Strategic Deterrent intercontinental ballistic missile warheads. The agency will have to formally make its case for splitting that space — and workforce — with Surplus Plutonium Disposition in an analysis of alternatives, Kay said.

“[T]here’s a lot of interest in competing missions using PF-4 and the amount of growth that has to occur in PF-4 to support the 30-pit-per-year mission,” Kay said Friday. “So we have to assess all reasonable alternatives for how to address that capability gap for plutonium oxide production. And so as part of that, it’s foreseeable that we would consider [the] Pantex [Plant in Amarillo, Texas] as a reasonable option to do that. Whether it really is reasonable or not has yet to be determined.