The House Appropriations Committee’s proposed Department of Energy budget for fiscal year 2022 would slash funding for one of the potential disposal routes for surplus weapon-usable plutonium that has to be removed from South Carolina under terms of a record-setting legal settlement.
The bill would deny $145 million in 2022 funding requested for the Versatile Test Reactor at the Idaho National Laboratory by DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy. The planned plutonium-burning reactor figured into DOE’s 2022 budget request as part of the Joe Biden administration’s drive to lower fossil fuel emissions, but the House Appropriations Committee provided not a cent of the requested funding in a spending bill the whole chamber could vote on as soon as next week.
DOE wanted the $145 million “for preliminary design and other activities for the Versatile Test Reactor,” which is “essential for meeting U.S. clean energy goals and rebuilding U.S. economic prosperity and global economic competitiveness,” according to the agency’s 2022 budget request for its Office of Nuclear Energy.
Every year the Versatile Test Reactor lags behind is a year the DOE could not use it to consume some of the 34 metric tons of surplus plutonium that is supposed to pass through the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., on its way to permanent disposal. DOE is under extra pressure to remove some 9.5 tons of the tranche, which according to a $600-million settlement struck with the state in 2020 must be out of South Carolina by 2037.
DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is responsible for disposing of the plutonium, and the semi-autonomous nuclear-weapons agency has said that it will sock most of the material away by chemically weakening it, blending it with inert, grout-like material and burying the mixture at DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico as part of a program called Surplus Plutonium Disposition.
Under the disposition program, Los Alamos National Laboratory would oxidize plutonium that’s in metallic form and Savannah River would mix it with grout. The whole program would run from 2028 into the 2040s, NNSA has said.
In May, the Department of Energy said it would have to conduct a geotechnical analysis of the proposed Versatile Test Reactor site at Idaho National Lab’s Materials and Fuels Complex. That analysis would not be ready until “late 2021 or early 2022,” meaning it could delay a required environmental analysis that was expected to be finished this year, according to DOE’s May interim action determination.
DOE greenlit the Versatile Test Reactor in 2019, at which time the agency thought it could be built by 2026, according to an Idaho National Laboratory website.
“While we are disappointed no funding was included for the Versatile Test Reactor (VTR), we recognize the overall funding challenges the Committee faces,” the American Nuclear Society wrote in a statement emailed to media after Friday’s vote on the latest DOE appropriations package. “We urge congressional leaders to take a closer look at VTR as the process moves forward.”
