A metric ton of plutonium once slated to be de-weaponized forever would instead be used to help the Department of Energy manufacture new nuclear-weapon cores some time in the next decade, the agency confirmed Monday.
The fissile material is part of a large tranche declared surplus to defense needs by the Bill Clinton administration in 1995, after the end of the Cold War. Since then, DOE has decided to process nearly 50 metric tons of surplus plutonium for disposal at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., under programs funded by the agency’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).
But earlier this year, DOE decided one of those metric tons was not surplus to defense needs after all.
“Following an extensive review of the material, DOE and NNSA designated the one metric ton of plutonium for defense production use in May 2018,” an NNSA spokesperson said by email Monday.
It was a decision the agency made at the business end of a gavel held by a U.S. District Court judge in South Carolina, who on Dec. 20, 2017, ordered DOE to move a metric ton of plutonium out of the state by Jan. 1, 2020, because the department had failed to start converting some of the surplus material into commercial reactor fuel by Jan. 1, 2016, using the as-yet incomplete Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF). The federal agency has appealed the case to the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, which heard arguments from the sides last week in Richmond, Va.
If the District Court ruling holds, the 1 metric ton of plutonium to be removed from South Carolina would be shipped to the Los Alamos National Laboratory to help make fissile weapon cores called plutonium pits. The Energy Department needs new pits to replacing aging cores now fitted with deployed U.S. nuclear weapons.
The MFFF was supposed to dispose of some 34 metric tons of weapon-usable plutonium. Some, but not all, of that plutonium is now at the Savannah River Site, along with portions of a separate tranche of 9 metric tons of plutonium declared surplus to defense needs in 2009. The NNSA shipped surplus defense plutonium to the site from 2002 to 2014.
The agency now wants to dispose of the 34 metric tons of plutonium by diluting the material in proposed Savannah River facilities, mixing it with concrete-like grout, and burying the resulting mixture deep underground in New Mexico at the agency’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
