At the Energy Department’s request, the congressionally chartered National Academies will study the potential for sending 34 metric tons of processed weapon-grade plutonium — and possibly other waste — to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M.
Besides the 34 metric tons of plutonium — which under an arms control pact with Russia was supposed to be turned into commercial nuclear reactor fuel — the National Academies said in an undated task statement it will consider if WIPP is a suitable disposal site for “other potential waste streams” including “other plutonium wastes, Greater-than-Class-C-like wastes, and tank wastes.”
The Department of Energy on July 14 awarded the National Academies a roughly $900,000 contract to prepare the report. The review will be completed under the auspices of the Academies’ Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board.
“Greater-than-Class-C” waste is the most radioactive sort of low-level radioactive waste, which typically is contaminated material or equipment. Tank waste includes the roughly 90 million gallons of liquid radioactive waste stored in underground tanks at DOE’s Hanford and Savannah River sites. Much of that is high-level waste left over from Cold War weapons programs.
The 34 metric tons of plutonium covered under the 2000 U.S.-Russian Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement was intended to be converted into mixed-oxide fuel that could be burned in commercial nuclear reactors. The conversion would happen at the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility under construction at DOE’s Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C.
However, both the U.S. and Russia have since gravitated toward other disposal methods for their weapon-grade plutonium, leaving the arms control agreement in a somewhat acrimonious limbo and the Mixed-Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility perpetually on the chopping block in DOE budget requests.
The Barack Obama administration proposed abandoning the mixed-oxide fuel approach and instead diluting the plutonium by mixing it with concrete-like grout, then burying it at WIPP. The Donald Trump administration has recommended the same approach, but Congress is split on whether to go along with the White House. The House favors the mixed-oxide approach, while the Senate wants to cancel that plan.
In addition to the tons of plutonium-contaminated transuranic waste already buried at WIPP, the Obama administration last year decided to send 6 metric tons of weapon-usable plutonium that was not part of the U.S.-Russia arms pact to the deep-underground New Mexico facility. That material is now being processed at the Savannah River Site.
A National Academies review is not necessarily a quick process. The nuclear and radiation studies board took roughly four years to finish a lessons-learned report about the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster in Japan.
