The U.S. Department of Energy remains on track to remove a remaining half-metric of plutonium from the Savannah River Site and the state of South Carolina by the end of the year, thereby meeting an order in a federal lawsuit from 2016, according to a June 13 status report.
South Carolina sued the federal government in February 2016, invoking a federal law that required the Department of Energy to remove 1 metric ton of surplus, weapon-usable plutonium from the state by Jan. 1, 2016, after failing to turn it into commercial reactor fuel using Savannah River’s then-incomplete and now-canceled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF). The state also sought $100 million a year in fines associated with DOE’s failure to remove the ton of material by Jan. 1, 2016.
In December 2017, U.S. District Judge J. Michelle Childs ordered DOE to remove the 1 metric ton by Jan. 1, 2020.
In last week’s court-mandated status report to Childs, the agency said it will ship half of that tranche of plutonium from South Carolina by the end of the year, either “to the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas, and/or the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New, Mexico.” The Energy Department reported in January that, prior to November 2018, it had shipped the other half-ton to the Nevada National Security Site.
The department does not provide details of plutonium shipping campaigns for security reasons and will not do so, even to the court, until “sufficient time” has passed after the shipment, according to the report. The status report says the material “has been or will be shipped” by the Jan. 1, 2020 deadline.
In a supplement analysis published around August 2018, DOE said the plutonium covered by Childs’ 2017 order would go to Pantex and Nevada before going to the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Los Alamos did not have space to store 1 metric ton of plutonium at the time DOE published the supplement analysis. The Energy Department expects the half-ton delivered to Nevada to stay there until around 2026.
