Inching forward with plans to dispose of surplus plutonium at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, the National Nuclear Security Administration plans public hearings after New Year’s on its just-released draft environmental review of the project, the agency said recently.
The nuclear-weapons agency on Friday released a draft environmental impact statement about its planned Surplus Plutonium Disposition Program (SPD), kicking off a 60-day public comment period that will include “multiple public hearings in early 2023,” the agency wrote in a Dec. 16 press release about the two-volume, 600-page review.
The agency had yet to publish details about the planned public meetings, but according to the press release they were to take place near the Savannah River Site, the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant: the three sites that will handle the bulk of the SPD workload.
SPD is the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) plan to immobilize 34 metric tons of plutonium declared surplus to national defense needs at the end of the Cold War. The program replaces the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, which was canceled and turned into a plutonium pit factory that could open by 2036 at Savannah River, the NNSA has told Congress.
The agency plans to start work on SPD in 2028 or so and most of it will happen at two sites: the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., where several tons of the material were already stored, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which will prepare surplus plutonium for processing at the new glovebox line going up at Savannah River’s K-Area.
Also to lend a hand are the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas, which stores much of the surplus plutonium not already delivered to Savannah River, and the Y-12 National Security Site, which will receive uranium from disassembled surplus plutonium pits, the NNSA wrote in the draft environmental impact statement published last week. Pits are the cores of nuclear-weapon first stages.
The surplus plutonium, once combined at Savannah River with a concrete-like mixture formerly known as stardust, will be buried at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in southeast New Mexico. Because the Department of Energy excludes the volume of much packaging when calculating underground waste volumes at the deep-underground disposal south near Carlsbad, N.M., the final SPD product will take up very little of the mine’s highly in-demand space, the agency says.
That is an important consideration because the state of New Mexico and the DOE are locked up in negotiations over the future of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, with the state playing hardball and threatening to cut the federal government off from the mine decades sooner than DOE would prefer.
At Los Alamos, SPD mission will compete for glovebox space and personnel with the higher-priority national security mission of casting new plutonium pits for future nuclear warheads. Los Alamos is supposed to start making multiple war-ready pits in 2024 and graduate to making at least 30 annually by 2026.
