The Department of Energy said this week it has started work to move a metric ton of plutonium out of South Carolina, after three federal appeals judges affirmed a lower court’s order to remove the material from the state by Jan. 1, 2020.
Barring an escalation to the U.S. Supreme Court, or a rehearing in the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, DOE now has a little more than a year to move the bomb-grade material out of South Carolina. The agency has 90 days from the Oct. 26 order to take the case to the Supreme Court, or 45 days to ask for a rehearing before all 18 Fourth Circuit judges.
“The Department will confer with the Department of Justice about the decision,” a spokesperson for DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) said by email Monday. “In the meantime, we are already engaged in moving the 1 [metric ton] of plutonium out of the state and expect to move approximately half this [calendar] year and half next year.”
The precise nature of this engagement was not clear at deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor; the NNSA declined to comment about whether any plutonium had already been moved, citing security concerns. The plutonium in question is now stored at Savannah River Site’s K-Area. NNSA personnel there will have to repackage the material before it ships out. The agency had started work to re-certify some shipping containers at Savannah River in June, a progress report filed with U.S. District Court says. Another progress report is due to the court in mid-December.
To comply with the District Court’s Dec. 20, 2017, order, DOE plans to ship the plutonium to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where the material will be used to help produce fissile weapon cores called plutonium pits. This metric ton of formerly surplus plutonium, which DOE redesignated as “for defense-production use” in July, could make stops at the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas, or the Nevada National Security Site on its way to Los Alamos, the agency has said.
The District Court handed down its order to remove the plutonium as part of a lawsuit filed by the state of South Carolina in 2016. The state claimed the agency violated federal law by failing to either convert a ton of bomb-grade plutonium into commercial reactor fuel by Jan. 1, 2016, or to remove the plutonium from South Carolina by that date.
The Energy Department appealed the ruling, saying District Judge J. Michelle Childs failed to consider legally available options that would have given the agency more time to remove the plutonium from the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C. The appeals court judges rejected that argument, saying the roughly two-year deadline Childs set was essentially the same amount of time Congress believed it would take DOE to move the plutonium out of state when legislators wrote the federal law that codified the convert-or-ship-out provision central to South Carolina’s lawsuit.
The Department of Energy had planned to convert surplus weapon-grade plutonium into reactor fuel using the now-canceled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at Savannah River. The unfinished facility was designed to satisfy the terms of a 2000 arms-control agreement between the U.S. and Russia that required both countries to deweaponize 34 metric tons of bomb-grade plutonium.
The Energy Department officially canceled MOX Services’ prime contract to the build the plant on Oct. 11, a little less than two years after the agency first asked Congress to defund the facility. The agency wants to turn the plant into a factory to annually produce 50 plutonium pits by 2030; DOE needs the warhead cores for future modernization of the nuclear arsenal, including the U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile fleet.
Nuclear watchdog groups from South Carolina and New Mexico this week blasted out press releases complaining that the NNSA’s pit production plans would run afoul of federal environmental laws. The groups, including Savannah River Watch and Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said they reminded the agency it needs to complete more thorough environmental reviews before moving forward with industrial-scale pit-production. Nuclear Watch New Mexico, in particular, has said pit production is totally unnecessary, given the availability of legacy warheads that could be used to refurbish active warheads.
Meanwhile, DOE is putting together a plan to get rid of the 34 metric tons of plutonium that was once to be converted in the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility. The new approach, proposed in 2016 and called dilute and dispose, involves chemically weakening the plutonium in new — and mostly unfunded — facilities at Savannah River, then mixing the material with concrete-like grout called stardust and burying the resulting mixture deep underground in New Mexico at the agency’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
