The National Nuclear Security Administration will meet legal obligations to remove plutonium from South Carolina even though it delayed a facility critical to breaking down old plutonium pits, the agency said Friday.
The agency made the declaration in a record of decision published in the Federal Register. The decision, the end of a required environmental review of the project, formalized the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) plan to dispose of 34 metric tons of weapon-usable plutonium.
“This decision will allow NNSA to continue to remove surplus plutonium from South Carolina in alignment with the DOE-South Carolina Settlement Agreement,” the agency wrote in the record of decision published Friday in the Federal Register.
Though the NNSA on Friday said there would be no legal trouble arising from the decision to delay the pit disassembly facility, the agency also did not provide a timetable for completing the downblending in the record of decision, writing only that “[t]his decision will extend the timeline for the full 34 [metric ton] disposition mission.”
The NNSA has said dilute and dispose work at Savannah River would continue into the 2040s, at least.
The NNSA has for years planned to dilute and dispose of the material, turning much of it into plutonium oxide at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in northern New Mexico, mixing it with a concrete-like material sometimes called Stardust at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and burying it deep underground the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.
Congress in 2018 allowed the agency to proceed with the plan, canceling the previous disposal route, the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, in the process.
The plutonium to be processed in dilute and dispose includes both pits, the round, fissile cores of nuclear-weapon primary stages, and non-pit plutonium metal and oxide, NNSA has said.
The agency in October said it would not build a Pit Disassembly and Processing facility at Savannah River until the mid-2030s, about 10 years later than once planned. At the time the agency did not say whether delaying the disassembly facility would affect its ability to meet legal deadlines, set in a 2020 settlement with the state, to remove plutonium from South Carolina.
