The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) will soon consider alternatives to breaking down nuclear-weapon cores for disposal at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico as part of a plan to eliminate 34 metric tons of excess plutonium, an agency official said this week.
Dilute and dispose, officially the Surplus Plutonium Disposition Program, involves taking apart plutonium pits, now stored at the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas, at Los Alamos’ Plutonium Facility (PF-4). There, the material would be oxidized for stability and shipped to the Savannah River Site in South Carolina to be blended with inert material in preparation for final disposal in New Mexico at DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
“But those plans to use Los Alamos for that mission haven’t been finalized yet,” and the agency will soon begin “a formal analysis of alternatives” to that approach, Virginia Kay of the NNSA Material Management and Minimization program in the Office of Material Disposition, said Monday in a virtual presentation to the Institute of Nuclear Materials Management (INMM). The group held its annual meeting online this week.
For now, however, Los Alamos’ Advanced Recovery and Integration Extraction System (ARIES) infrastructure is the only game in town for the mission. That might not be a problem, if the disposal mission was not competing for space at the lab with the NNSA’s weapons mission. PF-4 is supposed to start casting new plutonium pits for W87-1 intercontinental ballistic missile warheads in fiscal 2024, and that top-priority work will sponge up people and space also needed for dilute and dispose. Both require technicians and glove boxes in PF-4.
Separate from the analysis of alternatives, Kay did not provide a timeline for finishing an NNSA environmental review needed to formalize the agency’s choice to bury the excess plutonium at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, rather than convert it into commercial reactor fuel at Savannah River’s now-canceled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility.
Edwin Lyman, a member of the Institute of Nuclear Materials Management and a career watchdog on nuclear materials security, pressed Kay for a timeline.
In his own presentation to the meeting on Wednesday, Lyman recommended the NNSA centralize the Surplus Plutonium Disposition Program at Pantex.
This, according to slides Lyman briefed, would reduce the number of plutonium shipments over the road. It would, however, require the NNSA to build new waste handling facilities at Pantex — a highly sensitive facility that, he speculated, would not be opened to international observers seeking to verify that the U.S. was indeed rendering plutonium unattractive for weapons use.
The NNSA projects that the Surplus Plutonium Disposition program will begin in 2028 and run through the 2040s.
