Redacted documents released to a nuclear watchdog group show that the Savannah River Site in South Carolina will receive shipments of plutonium, uranium, and other nuclear materials for the next 15-plus years, with no current disposition pathway for much of the material already stored on-site.
Savannah River Site Watch in January received via a Freedom of Information Act request the SRS nuclear materials management plans from 2015 and 2016. The documents, prepared by site management contractor Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS) for the Energy Department, outline proposed schedules and dates for SRS to receive and process foreign and domestic nuclear materials.
Specific amounts of material, schedules for their arrival, and other notable pieces of information have been redacted from the documents. “Releasing said information would harm the integrity of DOE’s decision-making process,” the agency wrote in the FOIA letter.
The documents state that L-Basin, a storage facility at SRS, will receive spent nuclear fuel from domestic and foreign research reactors through fiscal 2035, and cores from the High Flux Isotope Reactor at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee through fiscal 2030.
In addition, H Canyon, the nation’s only hardened chemical separations facility, is expected to process 40 metric tons of highly enriched uranium (HEU) between fiscal years 2018 and 2024. That nuclear weapon-grade uranium will be converted to low-enriched material and then sent to the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) for use in commercial power reactors.
Finally, the site’s K-Area “has enough capacity to receive and store Gap Special Nuclear Material (SNM) within approved shipping containers and additional excess plutonium oxides,” according to the 2016 plan.
In the 2016 plan, under a section titled “Issues,” SRNS states that the lack of a disposition path for material already stored at SRS is a concern. SRS currently stores at least 13 metric tons of plutonium, according to previous DOE reports.“The most significant issue with respect to the current inventory of (spent nuclear fuell) at SRS is the lack of an assigned disposition path for certain SNF and plutonium materials,” SRNS wrote in the plan.
SRS did not respond to inquiries on how much plutonium, uranium, and spent fuel is currently stored on site.
The contractor added that, for the plutonium, one potential solution would be using the material as feed for the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF), which would require plutonium feed to process larger amounts of weapon-usable plutonium and convert the material into commercial nuclear fuel. Another option would be to dispose of the material off-site. “Decisions/funding need to be made on the appropriate disposition path,” SRNS wrote in the plan.
SRS has been a well-known landing spot for nuclear materials over the years, including shipments of plutonium from Japan and Switzerland that were sent to the site last year. Environmental groups and the South Carolina Governor’s Office have been vocal naysayers of receiving the material. SRS Watch Director Tom Clements, for example, said in a statement that “more effort must be put into a permanent and near-term halt to the inflow of nuclear materials into SRS and the development of acceptable disposition paths.” Gov. Henry McMaster’s office did not offer a new statement, but said it maintains its position that the federal government needs to create a pathway to get the nuclear materials out of the state.
