The Department of Energy should consider performing a lengthy environmental review of its plan to dispose of 34 metric tons of surplus weapon-usable plutonium by burying the material deep underground, a congressionally chartered panel said Friday.
The department’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) might find the disposal plan easier to manage if it produces “a full programmatic environmental impact statement” of the so-called dilute-and-dispose approach, according to experts from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. The Trump administration has embraced an Obama-era plan, under which the NNSA would chemically weaken the surplus plutonium in South Carolina, mix it with concrete-like grout, and bury the mixture deep underground in New Mexico at DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
The panel said a full environmental impact statement would clarify the scope of the project, which in scale dwarfs any plutonium dilution operation the agency has so far attempted.
The finding was part of an interim report published Friday by the National Academies’ ad hoc Committee on Disposal of Surplus Plutonium at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. The panel is studying the “general viability” of dilute-and-dispose at the behest of Congress, which ordered the report in 2016 after the Obama administration officially asked lawmakers to cancel the unfinished Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) at the Savannah River Site.
The plant was designed to turn the 34 metric tons of plutonium into commercial nuclear reactor fuel under a reciprocal plutonium-disposal pact signed with Russia in 2000. The Trump administration in October canceled MOX Services’ contract to build the MFFF, after announcing it wanted to turn the incomplete facility into a factory for fissile nuclear warhead cores called plutonium pits.
Friday’s report is one of two the National Academies panel plans to issue. The committee plans to release the second and final report in June, Chairman Robert Dynes said during a Friday webinar.
South Carolina is suing to block the NNSA’s decision to repurpose the plant and proceed with dilute-and-dispose without at least producing a new environmental impact statement.
In a lawsuit the state filed in May, federal judges in district and circuit courts said the agency might still be on the hook to write a new environmental impact statement, and that previous environmental reviews of surplus plutonium disposal might not cover all aspects of dilute-and-dispose. The NNSA has not disclosed the details of its plan, or even if it has one, for an environmental review of dilute-and-dispose.
A full programmatic environmental statement “would help ensure the proper scope and scale of the proposed change” to dilute and dispose, the National Academies committee wrote in its Friday report.
A full environmental impact statement requires public participation in the form of comments published in the Federal Register and could take the NNSA years to prepare. Every year the agency cannot convert the MFFF into a pit-production plant is another year by which it might miss the Donald Trump administration’s deadline for annual production of at least 80 warhead cores by 2030.
The NNSA has proposed making pits at both the converted MFFF and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The lab has already started a multibillion-dollar upgrade to existing plutonium facilities that, the NNSA hopes, will allow the agency to produce at least 30 pits a year in New Mexico by 2026.
Los Alamos would also have a role in dilute-and-dispose: oxidizing the surplus plutonium so Savannah River can dilute it and mix the fissile material with grout.
While dilute-and-dispose “is not technically challenging,” the National Academies panel said, the NNSA has yet to deal with a legal hurdle that, at this point in the decades-long surplus plutonium saga, has been repeated ad nauseam: Congress might have to change federal law so the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant can fit all the diluted surplus plutonium that dilute-and-dispose would produce, and so that the facility can stay open for roughly 15 years past its planned closure date.
The NNSA “currently estimates that the effort to dilute and dispose of 34 MT of surplus plutonium will take 31 years to complete, beginning with conceptual design in 2018 and ending with emplacement of all 34 MT of diluted plutonium at WIPP in 2049,” the National Academies panel said.
