The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) said Tuesday it plans to soon start work on a South Carolina plutonium disposal project — operations that will consume about one-third of the amount Congress appropriated for the project in the current 2020 federal budget year.
This site preparation work for the Surplus Plutonium Disposition project at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina will cost roughly $28 million, the semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear weapons agency stated in a press release. Congress appropriated nearly $80 million for the project in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30.
The release does not say when this work will begin.
Site preparation includes demolition and security modifications at Savannah River Site’s K-Area Complex: a Hazard Category 1 nuclear facility where the agency stores 11.5 metric tons of surplus plutonium, along with other special nuclear material. The project will eventually add three plutonium-handling glove boxes to K-Area: two to process plutonium and one as a spare.
The NNSA had not issued its detailed 2021 budget request at deadline Wednesday for Weapons Complex Morning Briefing, so it was not clear how much funding the agency is seeking in 2021 for the Surplus Plutonium Disposition project: one part of the broader, multi-site Surplus Plutonium Disposition program that eventually aims to remove 34 metric tons of weapon-usable plutonium from the U.S. nuclear stockpile.
The NNSA has yet to formally approve a disposal pathway for all 34 metric tons of this plutonium, which was once slated to be converted into commercial nuclear reactor fuel using the Savannah River Site’s partially built Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility. The agency now plans to convert that facility into a plant capable of annually producing 50 fissile nuclear warhead cores called plutonium pits by 2030.
Under the nationwide Surplus Plutonium Disposal program, the NNSA notionally plans to chemically dilute the 34 metric tons of plutonium at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and Savannah River, blend the diluted plutonium with an inert material called stardust — the exact composition of which is classified — and then dispose of the mixture deep underground at the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP).
