A project to ship highly enriched uranium from a facility in Ontario, Canada, to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina wrapped up sometime last year, according to a Wednesday press release.
It is unclear when the shipments were completed, but DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) said the job was finished 12 months ahead of schedule. The news was first reported this week during the International Conference on Nuclear Security in Austria, where NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty and Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette were in attendance.
According to the NNSA, 200 kilograms of weapon-grade uranium were shipped from the Chalk River Laboratories to the Energy Department facility near Aiken, S.C., a distance of about 1,176 miles. This mission is separate from the 6,000 gallons of HEU that are also being shipped from the Canadian facility for processing at Savannah River’s H Canyon facility.
An NNSA spokesperson said through email Thursday that the mission began in 2015 and involved 56 shipments. Now, the material is being stored at L-Basin, awaiting disposition via processing at the site’s H Canyon facility.
The NNSA said the 200 kilograms represent the largest removal of spent nuclear fuel to the United States. Canada paid for the shipments, so the NNSA is not privy to the costs, the agency spokesperson said. In Canada, the material was being used to power experimental research reactors.
The transport of the HEU falls under the U.S. Foreign Research Spent Nuclear Fuel Acceptance Program, established in 1996 to repatriate U.S.-origin material. Over several decades, the U.S. has sent multiple stockpiles of weapon-grade material to other nations for research purposes, with the understanding it would be returned for safe disposition.
