Workers at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site should finish construction there later this year of a new storage facility for drums of down-blended plutonium that will ultimately be certified as transuranic waste and sent to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.
Once the Aiken, S.C. site’s K Area storage facility, with enough space for 3,800 drums, is complete and passes muster with the Environmental Protection Agency, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) should authorize the first shipment planned for 2022, the DOE announced in a Tuesday press release.
Equipment components weighing more than 70,000 pounds have been moved to the K Area complex, which provides handling and interim storage of U.S. excess plutonium and other special nuclear materials, from the Savannah River Solid Waste Management Facility.
The principal building at the K Area once housed K Reactor. The plutonium down-blending mission was authorized in September 2016 and involves mixing plutonium oxide with an adulterant material, rendering it unusable for weapons.
The downblending of 6 metric tons of surplus plutonium in the K Area started in 2017 and was then suspended in October 2019 for extensive maintenance before resuming last July. The weapon-usable plutonium DOE’s environmental management office is blending down at K Area comes from Cold War production at Savannah River and processing operations at the long-shuttered Rocky Flats plutonium pit plant in Colorado.
In addition, the semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration is planning a formal review of its plans to de-weaponize another 34 metric tons of surplus plutonium that until 2018 was supposed to be converted into nuclear power plant fuel at the now-cancelled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at Savannah River.
The recent equipment transfer should speed up removal and disposal of plutonium from South Carolina, DOE said. Maxcine Maxted, a nuclear materials senior technical adviser, said centralizing equipment at the K Area will allow Savannah River Site to eliminate the step of sending the drums to the site’s solid waste facility for characterization before shipment to WIPP.
“Now we can perform both of those tasks right from K Area, making the process more efficient,” Maxted said in the press release.
