NNSA publishes final environmental study on disposal of surplus plutonium

January 26, 2024
By Exchange Monitor

About a year after it released a draft of the document, the National Nuclear Security Administration published a final environmental review of its plant to dispose of dozens of tons of surplus, weapon-usable plutonium.

The nuclear weapons agency published its final Surplus Plutonium Disposition Program (SPDP) Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) in the Federal Register on Jan. 19.

The document covers 34 metric tons of plutonium, which would be treated at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., before getting buried at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in southeast New Mexico.

The treatments at Los Alamos and Savannah River would both make the plutonium inaccessible to bad actors who want to weaponize it and qualify it as defense-related transuranic waste, making it eligible for disposal at WIPP.

Though the Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) have cleared one big legal hurdle by completing the environmental review and another by negotiating an agreement to keep WIPP open, obstacles remain to getting rid of the plutonium.

For one, the new hazardous waste permit New Mexico and DOE agreed to gives the state more leeway to slow or stop disposal operations. For another, the surplus plutonium mission competes for glovebox space and personnel at Los Alamos with the higher-priority national security mission of casting new plutonium pits for future nuclear warheads.

Congress, in the latest National Defense Authorization Act, recognized the log jam at Los Alamos and gave pits legal priority over the disposal mission.

Meanwhile, as part of a major legal settlement that followed the NNSA’s decision to scrap the previous method of surplus plutonium disposal at Savannah River, DOE faces a legal deadline to remove plutonium from South Carolina. Any delay to the plutonium disposition program inches DOE and the palmetto state closer to another courtroom showdown.