The Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Program would be formally closed out once and for all by fiscal year 2022, the National Nuclear Security Administration’s latest budget request shows, and the agency’s replacement plutonium disposal program would take delivery of key hardware.
The Surplus Plutonium Disposition (SPD) Program will combine facilities at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico to chemically weaken 34 metric tons of surplus plutonium, blend it with inert grout, once called stardust, and dispose of the mixture deep underground at DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
Savannah River’s share of this work, sometimes called dilute-and-dispose, will happen mostly at the site’s K-Area alongside existing, and separate, plutonium downblending operations led by DOE’s Office of Environmental Management.
In fiscal year 2022, Savannah River’s SPD Project — South Carolina’s half of the two-state program — is scheduled to take delivery of one of the three gloveboxes needed to mix surplus plutonium and grout, according to the National Nuclear Security Administration’s detailed fiscal year 2022 budget request.
If all goes according to the NNSA’s plans, and the Joe Biden administration’s budget request becomes law, the SPD Project team at Savannah River should finish all the paperwork and reviews necessary for the NNSA to approve the start of construction of the new facilities at K-Area in fiscal year 2022, according to the budget request.
SPD is supposed to begin processing plutonium around 2028 and operate into the 2040s.
Last year, the DOE and South Carolina reached a $600 million settlement, the largest in state history, that both sides hoped would resolve the agency’s failure to dispose of 34 metric tons of plutonium using the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at Savannah River Site’s F-Area. The facility, officially cancelled in 2018, was to turn the plutonium into commercial reactor fuel starting in the 2020s.
Now, “[f]inal physical project termination and asset disposition [for the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility] remains on schedule to [be] completed by FY 2021,” the NNSA wrote in its latest budget request.
Meanwhile, the NNSA’s Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation account overall, which includes nuclear counterterrorism and response efforts, would be about flat, year-over-year, if the Biden administration’s budget becomes law: $2.2 billion.
Cut out counterterrorism programs and some legacy pension obligations, which are book kept under the nonproliferation appropriation, and core nonproliferation programs would be down about half a percent to $1.85 billion in 2022 from $1.86 billion in 2021.
The overall Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation request for 2022 is still about 10% higher than the $2.1 billion that Donald Trump administration, in its final NNSA budget forecast, planned to seek for nonproliferation programs in fiscal year 2022.
