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.
Separately, the bill rejects the Administration’s plan to trim the Inertial Confinement Fusion program’s budget by about $5 million in 2022 by using leftover 2021 funding to continue a portfolio of high energy density physics projects that can aid nuclear-weapons maintenance.
The budget expected to appear on the House floor next week 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.”
ICF Would Get Cash Infusion Instead of Carryover for FY2022
Meanwhile, House Appropriators proposed $580 million for Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) in fiscal year 2022, up $5 million compared with the 2021 appropriation but more than $50 million above the request of roughly $530 million.
“The Committee notes the importance of the ICF program and the aging nature of the facilities,” appropriators wrote in a detailed report appended to the 2022 Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies Appropriations Bill. “The NNSA is directed to provide to the Committee not later than 120 days after enactment of this Act a strategic plan for recapitalizing, upgrading, and maintaining ICF facilities. This plan shall include cost estimates and a reasonable timeframe for implementation.”
The committee’s bill overall has about $20 billion for the NNSA, roughly flat with the 2021 level, but with a smaller increase for nuclear weapons life-extension programs and infrastructure upgrades than the Donald Trump administration thought would be necessary for the budget year that begins Oct. 1.
ICF’s three big facilities are: the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California; the Z pulsed power facility the at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M.; and the Omega Laser Facility at the University of Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics in Rochester, N.Y.
These facilities can produce data that is useful for evaluating plutonium aging, or for simulating the effects of nuclear explosions and environments on different materials. However, the ICF program, especially the National Ignition Facility at Livermore, have sometimes taken a ribbing throughout the nuclear security enterprise for its attempts to produce a sustained nuclear fission reaction — a breakthrough, as one old saw goes, that is always 30 years away, no matter which year it is.
“NNSA’s internal ICF 2020 review … concluded that the ignition threshold is likely beyond current experimental capabilities,” the agency wrote in its 2022 budget request. That report “recommended a research program focused on resolving key gaps in physics understanding and acquiring information at the current scales to justify cost, scope, and schedule for any future investments in experimental capability.”
Implementing that recommendation will be a “primary focus” for ICF in fiscal year 2022, the NNSA wrote in the request.
