The Government Accountability Office said Thursday the Department of Energy’s nuclear cleanup wing should reach deals with key federal entities that rely on H-Canyon at DOE’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina Site to process spent reactor fuel.
H-Canyon is the nation’s only nuclear chemical separations facility and the DOE Office of Environmental Management plans to stop using it in the 2030s, when it will be about 80 years old, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in a 21-page report.
Environmental Management agrees with the congressional watchdog and plans to have the written agreements in place for H-Canyon services by the end of 2024, according to DOE comments in the report.
The GAO report recommends Environmental Management get formal agreements in place with DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy, the National Nuclear Security Administration and the Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Nuclear Energy plans to use H-Canyon for future shipments of spent fuel from university research reactors, GAO said. The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) utilizes it for shipments of foreign reactor fuel not covered by other agreements, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology needs it for future fuel shipments from its Center for Neutron Research. The latter is a research reactor in Gaithersburg, Md., that shut down in 2021 but earlier this year received Nuclear Regulatory Commission permission to restart.
The United States and Japan already have a contract for NNSA to start removing highly-enriched uranium and plutonium from a Japanese research reactor in fiscal 2024, according to GAO.
“DOE plans for [the Savannah River Site] to downblend highly enriched uranium to produce high-assay low-enriched uranium for use in advanced nuclear reactors, among other things,” according to GAO.
Since the Cold War ended in the 1990s, DOE has used H-Canyon to process nuclear materials located at Savannah River other DOE sites not readily disposable in their existing forms, according to GAO.
DOE initially planned to retire H-Canyon in 2007 but kept it open to downblend highly-enriched uranium to low-enriched uranium, for sale to the Tennessee Valley Authority. More recently the Office of Environmental Management changed H-Canyon’s mission to dissolving the spent nuclear fuel stored in L-basin, which contains highly-enriched uranium, according to the National Defense Authorization Act report for fiscal 2023.
L-Basin’s spent fuel pool is approaching capacity, GAO said. “To accelerate this effort, EM [Environmental Management] is no longer extracting and recovering uranium for other use,” GAO said in the report. DOE has dubbed this effort the Accelerated Basin De-inventory program. The facility is scheduled to close in the 2030s.
