The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) indicated Monday it will not start disposal of 34 metric tons of surplus weapon-usable plutonium in South Carolina until 2028 — a date by which the agency could accrue more than $1 billion in financial penalties for failing to remove the material from the South Carolina facility.
The semiautonomous Department of Energy agency cited the schedule for startup of the Surplus Plutonium Disposition Project in a chart in the “NNSA Strategic Integrated Roadmap 2020-2044.”
The unfunded, unauthorized Surplus Plutonium Disposition Project, also sometimes called dilute-and-dispose, is the NNSA’s new method of getting rid of the plutonium under an arms-reduction pact signed with Russia in 2000.
The NNSA once planned to dispose of the plutonium by turning it into commercial reactor fuel in Savannah River’s now-canceled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) — a partially built structure the agency wants to turn into a factory for fissile nuclear warhead cores called plutonium pits.
Under federal law, the NNSA must pay the state of South Carolina a maximum of $100 million annually for every year after Jan. 1, 2016, that the agency fails to annually remove 1 metric ton of surplus weapon-usable plutonium from the Savannah River Site.
South Carolina in 2016 sued DOE in federal court to collect after the agency ditched the MFFF in favor of dilute-and-dispose — chemically weakening the plutonium, suspending it in an inert material known as stardust, and burying it deep underground at DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.
In a separate lawsuit in 2017, a U.S. District Court judge in South Carolina ordered the NNSA to remove 1 metric ton of the formerly MFFF-bound plutonium from Savannah River. The NNSA folded that metric ton of material back into its weapon-production pipeline and, some time last year, shipped half of that amount to the Nevada National Security Site over Nevada’s loud objections.
The Silver State sued in November to stop the shipment, only to be told by the NNSA months later that the plutonium had arrived in Nevada before the lawsuit was filed.
Last week, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) agreed to stop blocking nominees for top DOE management jobs after Energy Secretary Rick Perry and NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty agreed to meet with the lawmker in May at the Nevada National Security Site.
Part of the reason Cortez Masto agreed to stand aside was because Perry said the rest of the former MFFF plutonium would be removed from South Carolina using dilute-and-dispose. Cortez Masto’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the matter.
With dilute-and-dispose not due to start until 2028, DOE needs either a backup plan, or a new arrangement with South Carolina — something it could get before the summer is over.
The agency and Nevada are discussing a settlement in the state’s 2016 lawsuit over the plutonium fines. On March 26, when the parties were due to submit a status update, they instead asked the judge in the case for more time to conduct settlement talks: until late May, at least, according to court papers.
