The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) on Wednesday revealed new details about its proposed dilute-and-dispose plan to eliminate 34 metric tons of weapon-usable plutonium — including that the agency is close to beginning a yearlong environmental review of its new approach.
The agency will release its draft dilute-and-dispose supplemental environmental impact statement “in the very near future,” Paloma Richard, NEPA document manager in the NNSA’s Office of Material Disposition, told a National Academies panel in Washington, D.C.
The agency plans to publish the final version of the document “towards the end” of 2020, after at least three meetings to gather public comment, Richard said. The NNSA will host public meetings near the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M.
The plutonium is to be eliminated under a 2000 U.S.-Russian agreement. Dilute-and-dispose would replace the now-terminated plan to convert the material to reactor fuel at Savannah River.
Los Alamos would chemically alter the plutonium, which the Savannah River Site would then blend with a classified, concrete-like material called stardust that would be buried deep underground at WIPP.
Last year, DOE Secretary Rick Perry said dilute and dispose will cost about $20 billion through 2050. The NNSA requested $79 million for the program in fiscal 2020, which begins Oct. 1. The funding would pay for design studies, along with equipment such as new glove boxes for Savannah River, which technicians eventually would use to prepare the plutonium-stardust mixture to be buried at WIPP.
At the National Academies meeting, another NNSA official said dilute-and-dispose will need three new glove boxes. Two of these will run for 40 weeks out of the year, said Tom Cantey, surplus plutonium disposition program manager at the Office of Material Disposition.
Editor’s note, 04/19/2019, 11:10 a.m. Eastern. The story was corrected to read that NNSA plans three public meetings during one round of public comment on the anticipated Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement.
