Starting after Thanksgiving, citizens of the city of Aiken, S.C., can give the city council their two cents about how to spend $25 million in federal settlement money the city got because of a federal lawsuit involving the Department of Energy’s canceled plutonium recycling plant at the Savannah River Site, local media reported Monday.
Aiken City is located within the county of Aiken, the host county for the Savannah River Site. This year, the South Carolina legislature gave the counties of Aiken, Allendale and Barnwell 65% share of a federal settlement the Justice Department paid to South Carolina in 2020 because the Department of Energy did not remove several metric tons of plutonium from the state by a legally binding deadline.
Matthew Christian of the local Aiken Standard reported the city’s plans, discussed Monday during a city council meeting, on Twitter.
The first plutonium money public input session will be held between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
— Matthew V. Christian (@mattywrites) November 14, 2022
This summer, the South Carolina legislature divided up the $525 million left from the settlement — private attorneys who helped the state’s case took $75 million for themselves — and gave Aiken, Allendale and Barnwell the lion’s share to split three ways. The federal settlement in 2020, about a month before the presidential election, came out of the U.S. judgement fund, which the Department of Justice controls, and not DOE’s budget.
As part of the settlement, the end result of years of contentious litigation, DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) promised to remove 9.5 metric tons of plutonium from South Carolina by 2037.
The agency has not said exactly how it plans to do that.
DOE’s planned dilute and dispose program, officially called Surplus Plutonium Disposition, is the agency’s main means of getting rid of the plutonium now, though it was not expected to reach full capacity until 2028 or so and was not, by DOE’s estimate at the time of the settlement, on track to remove 9.5 metric tons by 2037.
Around the turn of the century, DOE planned to get rid of the plutonium stored in South Carolina, and declared surplus to national defense needs, by turning it into fuel for nuclear power plants using the now-canceled, and partially built, Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) at the Savannah River Site.
The plan proved economically infeasible and so DOE in 2018 got Congress’ permission to cancel the fuel fabrication facility and convert the portions of it the agency did build into a plant to produce plutonium pits: the fissile cores of nuclear-weapon first states.
Some of the plutonium that was supposed to be disposed of in the MFFF was diverted back into the weapons program in 2018. The NNSA has already shipped a small amount of plutonium out of Savannah River to the Nevada National Security Site, from which the material was supposed to make its way to the Los Alamos National Laboratory for use in the pit program there. Los Alamos will be the NNSA’s other pit factory.
MFFF was supposed to dispose of 34 metric tons of plutonium, much of which is still stored at Savannah River Site’s K-Area.
