WASHINGTON — The Department of Energy will release a detailed cost estimate for its plan to bury 34 metric tons of diluted weapon-usable plutonium in the New Mexico desert around June, an agency official said here Wednesday.
“June-ish,” Virginia Kay, deputy director of the DOE National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) Office of Material Disposition, told Weapons Complex Morning Briefing after a presentation to a National Academy of Sciences panel.
Under this dilute-and-dispose plan, the NNSA would chemically treat the plutonium and mix it with concrete-like grout at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C. The Department of Energy would then ship the material to its Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.
The NNSA is not calculating shipping costs as part of the dilute-and-dispose life-cycle estimate it hopes to send to Capitol Hill in June, but the agency will include a separate estimate of transportation costs based on internal agency data, Kay said.
The Department of Energy must eliminate the 34 metric tons of weapon-grade plutonium under an arms control pact with Russia finalized in 2010. The agency first planned to turn the material into commercial reactor fuel in the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) CB&I MOX Services is building at Savannah River, but has since deemed that approach unaffordable.
In 2017, after years of resistance, Congress said the NNSA could close down the MOX project, provided it could prove dilute and dispose costs half as much as simply finishing the MFFF. The life-cycle cost estimate Kay discussed here would, the agency hopes, provide that proof.
Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), chairman of the House Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee that writes the first draft of DOE’s annual budget bill, has repeatedly warned the agency not to cut corners or omit any expenses from its dilute-and-dispose cost estimate.
Meanwhile, Simpson’s committee is set to unveil its 2019 funding recommendations for the Department of Energy on Monday: well before the dilute-and-dispose report is expected on the Hill.
