Reopening the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) on Dec. 12, as the Energy Department plans, is the quickest and safest path to getting rid of 34 metric tons of surplus weapon-usable plutonium, an Ivy League professor and a member of the Union of Concerned Scientists advocacy group said in a Feb. 18 letter to the journal Nature.
The letter — from Union of Concerned Scientists senior scientist Edwin Lyman and Frank von Hippel, a particle physicist and professor at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University — rebutted a January commentary in Nature by Stanford University academics who said DOE should do an extensive safety analysis of WIPP to determine whether storing so much diluted plutonium there is even feasible.
“The reanalysis the [Stanford] authors propose would take several years,” Lyman and von Hippel wrote. “During this time, Congress could well abandon the disposal programme. Leaving the plutonium above ground indefinitely would pose a much greater environmental threat than disposing of it in WIPP.”
In a Feb. 18 telephone interview, von Hippel — a self-professed disarmament advocate who served as assistant director for national security in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy from 1992 to 1993 — said storing the diluted plutonium material at WIPP would be more secure than either leaving it where it is or turning it into fuel for commercial reactors, as DOE’s plan of record calls for under an arms-control pact finalized with Russia in 2010.
The White House favors a dilute-and-dispose approach that could eventually see the material shipped to WIPP. The fiscal 2017 budget request released Feb. 9 proposes shutting down the MOX Fuel Fabrication Facility at DOE’s Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., which is integral to the plan of record. The White House also wants, by 2022 or 2023, to send about 6 metric tons of diluted plutonium from a separate tranche of weapon-grade material to WIPP in what would essentially amount to a pilot project for disposing of the 34 metric-ton tranche.
