The Pantex Plant could soon rid itself of plutonium sent to the Amarillo, Texas, nuclear weapons depot from the Savannah River Site, the government’s independent nuclear safety agency said recently.
In late August, according to a report published this week by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, Pantex prime contractor Consolidated Nuclear Security (CNS) demonstrated its preferred method of repackaging some plutonium metal sent to Texas from the Savannah River Site.
The demonstration, part of a contractor readiness assessment, uncovered a few issues — officially, findings — for CNS to deal with before putting the repacking plan into action. The company planned to address the findings and then hand the plan over to the site’s local National Nuclear Security Administration official for a federal readiness assessment, the defense board reported.
The publicly unquantified amount of plutonium metal described in the defense board’s report arrived at Pantex from Savannah River inside of containers called 3013 cans, which themselves were packed inside larger Type B 9975 containers. The external 9975 containers are no longer certified as safe for outside shipment, so CNS planned to replace them, the board reported earlier this year.
Pantex is a waystation for some plutonium from the Savannah River Site that, after a big legal battle that ended in a record-setting settlement payment to the state just ahead of the 2020 election, was ordered out of South Carolina by a federal judge. NNSA planned to send some of this plutonium to the Los Alamos National Laboratory to make pits, first-stage cores, for future nuclear weapons.
In addition to its bread-and-butter nuclear-weapon servicing, Pantex is a storage vault of sorts for plutonium, including pits, metal and other forms of the fissile material.
