New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan-Grisham (D) wants the Department of Energy to explain how its plan to dispose of some seven metric tons of diluted, weapon-usable plutonium at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant complies with environmental law, according to a recent letter.
The tranche is part of the 34 metric tons of surplus plutonium that DOE’s semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is getting rid of under its Surplus Plutonium Disposition Program: the replacement for the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility that the agency officially cancelled in 2018.
The NNSA approved the seven tons of non-pit plutonium — material not currently in the form of a nuclear-weapon core — for dilute-and-dispose in August, setting the course for DOE’s Environmental Management Office to bury the material in the agency’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M.
But the NNSA “has not yet discussed the regulatory implications of such plans with [the New Mexico Environment Department] nor satisfied the approval conditions of its Resource Conservation and Recovery Act Hazardous Waste Facility Permit issued by the State of New Mexico,” the state regulator wrote in an Oct. 22 letter to the Savannah River Site Citizens Advisory Board. The DOE-chartered citizens’ group met Monday.
Savannah River Site will be a key part of NNSA’s expanded dilute-and-dispose program, which is based on a similar disposal program the Environmental Management office office already runs at the site. Like the smaller program, NNSA’s operation will be based at the Aiken, S.C., site’s K-Area.
But “to date, it has not specifically been articulated how DOE Environmental Management will ensure compliance with the [WIPP] Permit’s Waste Acceptance Criteria,” reads the letter, signed by James Kenney, secretary of the New Mexico Environment Department.
Besides permit compliance, the Lujan-Grisham administration also wants DOE to pony up some $31.5 million annually to keep WIPP and the roads to it in good repair “for the remaining useful life of WIPP,” the state environment department wrote.
That infrastructure tab would run out to almost a billion dollars if payments started in 2021, as New Mexico asked, and continued until about 2050: roughly the timeframe through which DOE wants to keep WIPP open. As written, the mine’s permit requires the agency to stop waste emplacement at WIPP in 2024.
DOE provided part of its annual appropriation for infrastructure improvements in New Mexico under the Land Withdrawal Act that created WIPP in the 1990s, but those investments ceased in 2012, according to the environment department’s letter.
New Mexico also got nearly $75 million worth of infrastructure investments from DOE in 2016, in the form of settlement money related to the 2014 underground radiation release at WIPP.
The NNSA is expanding Savannah River Site’s K-Are dilute-and-dispose operations to handle the full 34 metric tons to be diluted through about 2050. The agency plans to start building the expanding plutonium-handling infrastructure in K-Area in 2024, with an official cost estimate for Congress due in 2022 or so.
The new facility would ramp up to full operations in 2028 or so, according to NNSA’s current schedule, but the weapons agency can piggyback on the existing Environmental Management operations in K-Area, until then. Shipments out of South Carolina could start in 2022, Scott Cannon NNSA’s director of project management at the Savannah River Site, told the South Carolina Governor’s Nuclear Advisory Council Oct. 16.
