Plutonium downblending at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina has increased significantly after more shifts were added in November 2018.
Assuming work continues to proceed well, shifts could be further increased in fiscal 2020, about a year sooner than the initial target date.
Workers have downblended just over 17 kilograms of weapon-usable plutonium to date in fiscal 2019, and are expected to meet the target of 25 kilograms before the end of the federal budget year on Sept. 30, according to SRS spokesman Monte Volk.
That target is nearly triple the 9.7 kilograms downblended in fiscal 2018 at Savannah River. All told, 41 kilograms of plutonium have been downblended – mixed with inhibitor materials so that it could not be used in nuclear weapons production— since the mission began in September 2016.
Prior to the November 2018 ramp-up, SRS conducted the mission with single daily 12-hour shifts, four days per week. At that time, there was no specific worker count for the mission, carried out by employees of site management and operations contractor Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS) who had not been hired directly for that job. The contractor hired another 30 workers to increase the mission to one 12-hour shift each day, seven days a week.
Workers conduct the downblending through a glove box, a small “room” with safety panels that separate personnel from the hazardous materials they are working with. Employees use fitted glove-port openings to handle the plutonium.
The next anticipated scale-up would bring operations to two 12-hour shifts per day, running seven days a week and 24 hours a day. Fiscal 2020 begins on Oct. 1.
“The operational commitment to begin four-shift operations within our existing glovebox is the beginning of FY22; however, the facility is targeting to begin in late FY20,” Volk said by email.
The mission involves diluting 6 metric tons of weapon-usable plutonium, produced during the Cold Wear at Savannah River and the Rocky Flats plant in Colorado and now consolidated in South Carolina. When all 6 tons are downblended, the material will be shipped for permanent disposal at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico.
The mission is expected to run through fiscal 2046 at Savannah River’s K Complex. There is no specific cost estimate for the downblending project, since it is funded from the site’s nuclear materials budget item. That budget line received about $350 million for fiscal 2019.
The material is separate from a 34-metric-ton tranche of plutonium that was intended to be converted into nuclear reactor fuel through Savannah River’s never-finished Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, which DOE officially terminated last October. That tranche, similar to the 6 metric tons, is now expected to be downblended at SRS and eventually sent to WIPP.
