FORMER AREVA OFFICIAL DECRIES IMMOBILIZATION OPTION FOR SURPLUS PU

As the National Nuclear Security Administration examines alternatives for disposition of surplus plutonium under an agreement with Russia, a former AREVA official discounted the potential for immobilization of the material yesterday at an event on the fate of the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility. Earlier this year the NNSA announced it plans to slow down construction of MOX and seek alternatives due to cost increases, and since then some have suggested that immobilizing the material in canisters of vitrified waste could be an attractive option. “There is certainly nothing wrong in my mind with reassessing as you go along. That is not a problem. However, the immobilization alternatives that are being posited as real are at this point fiction and dream,” Alan Hanson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said yesterday at a Carnegie Endowment for International Piece event.

Hanson moved to MIT from AREVA, which is a partner in the MOX project under construction contractor Shaw AREVA MOX Services. He said that a major question about immobilization would be cost. “I would be very very surprised if any of the immobilization options could be executed for the projected cost for completion of the MOX project as it stands today, recognizing the $3.6 billion as a sunk cost already that can’t be retrieved in any way or another,” he said. He also added that he does not believe that the high-level waste at the Savannah River Site that would be used to encase the plutonium would have a high enough level of radioactivity to self-protect the plutonium from future use. “So you can stuff it away, you can hide it, you can bury it somewhere, but it ain’t going away until you bombard it with neutrons in either a full reactor, a fast reactor or an accelerator,” Hanson said. “My own personal belief is we ought to be moving as expeditiously as we can to really dispose of this material and make it non-weaponizable in the future.”