Next year, the Department of Energy wants to start extracting desirable national-security and nonproliferation isotopes from material stored at the Savannah River Site since the early 1970s, according to an environmental filing published Thursday.
The agency wants to take 65 Mark-18A targets out of storage at the Aiken, S.C., site’s L-Basin and chemically process them at the Shielded Cells Facility on the other side of the site, according to an amended record of decision published in the Federal Register Thursday — but dated Feb. 28 — and signed by James Owendoff, principal deputy assistant secretary of energy for environmental management.
Chemical separation at the Shielded Cells Facility could begin as soon as Oct. 1, 2019, and might last up to 10 years, DOE said. The work at SRS is only the first step in a process — to be completed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee — to obtain elements including plutonium-244 and heavy curium.
Plutonium-244, the longest-lived isotope of that transuranic element, is “a critical component of certified standards for high-precision laboratory analyses supporting nuclear forensics and nuclear non-proliferation,” according to Thursday’s amended record of decision.
Heavy curium, according to the amendment, “is needed as production feed for other isotopes such as 252Cf [californium-255].” Californium-255 has industrial applications, and can be used as a sort of tinder to start up a nuclear reactor.
L-Basin and the Shielded Cells Facility are about 10 miles apart as the crow flies, but a little farther away by road. In 2017, the DOE started procuring a container it needs to ship the targets to the processing facility from the storage facility, the agency wrote last month in its detailed 2019 budget request for the National Nuclear Security Administration.
The 65 Mark-18A targets left at Savannah River are part of a tranche of 86 produced in the 1970s. The plutonium-244 and heavy curium obtained from just 21 of those targets that decade constituted the world’s supply of those materials to date, according to the Department of Energy.
Meanwhile, Thursday’s amended record of decision is open to public comment until May 7.
