The U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) plans to produce intercontinental ballistic missile warhead cores starting in the next decade could delay plans to dilute and dispose of 34 metric tons of surplus weapon-usable plutonium, the Government Accountability Office reported Wednesday.
There are two reasons why, according to the 39-page report, “Surplus Plutonium Disposition: NNSA’s Long-Term Plutonium Oxide Production Plans Are Uncertain.”
First, the NNSA plans to dilute plutonium metal from surplus fissile weapon cores called pits at the same Los Alamos National Laboratory plant, the Plutonium Facility (PF-4) — the same facility that is supposed to start cranking out brand new pits for W87-1-style warheads in 2024 for future Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Second, diluted plutonium would, under the NNSA’s current dilute-and-dispose Surplus Plutonium Disposition program, be shipped to the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., to be prepared for permanent burial in the New Mexico desert — and South Carolina is currently suing the agency, and might sue the agency again, to get plutonium already sent to the state for this purpose shipped back out.
Pit material and plutonium oxide would compete for limited storage space at PF-4, if the NNSA is not free to ship the oxides to Savannah River.
In September, the NNSA approved a short-term plan to expand PF-4 and add 200 employees there to produce a little more than 1.2 tons of plutonium oxide — the diluted plutonium —between 2019 and 2025. That would take production right up into the second year of war-reserve pit production.
That was supposed to be only the start of a long-term plan approved in 2018 to ramp up production of plutonium oxide to 1.5 metric tons a year by 2033, on the way to diluting more than 25 metric tons of pit material by 2045. However, the agency in February decided to re-evaluate that plan.
“NNSA officials told us in February 2019 that as a result of pit production requirements, the agency might need to use a portion of the processing areas in PF-4 for pit production that the agency had planned to use for plutonium oxide production.” the Government Accountability Office (GAO) wrote.
NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty has said the pit mission is the enterprise’s top priority. Not all of the plutonium to be diluted and disposed of is in pit form.
In her written reply to the office’s findings, Gordon-Hagerty defended the Department of Energy’s dilute-and-dispose plan, which last year officially replaced the canceled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at Savannah River as the agency’s means of getting rid of weapon-usable plutonium declared surplus to defense needs after the end of the Cold War.
