ARLINGTON, VA —Planned plutonium pit production for nuclear defense purposes at two Department of Energy sites depends on the ability to dispose of resulting transuranic waste, a National Nuclear Security Administration executive said here Wednesday.
“A single bad waste drum is likely to have a bigger impact on our mission” than any bad pit, James McConnell, the associate principal deputy administrator for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), told DOE’s National Cleanup Workshop.
In February 2014, an improperly remediated drum of transuranic waste from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico overheated and ruptured in the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) underground. The resulting radiation leak in part of the salt mine effectively closed the disposal facility for about three years.
While McConnell did not explicitly mention the 2014 accident, he said that a significant radioactive waste accident would leave NNSA “with the inability to operate or generate waste … for a very long time.”
With that in mind, NNSA is emphasizing safety in its approach to the increased transuranic waste generation anticipated once plutonium pit production ramps up at Los Alamos and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
“The responsibility for waste management starts with the waste generator,” McConnell said. Partly because of this, NNSA set up an office of enterprise waste management within the past year, he said.
It is a small office of about 10 people already working on waste-related issues but scattered within NNSA, McConnell said. The staffers involved are comfortable interacting with DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, he added.
When asked by Exchange Monitor, McConnell said NNSA replacing Environmental Management as landlord at Savannah River on Oct. 1, 2024, “doesn’t change anything in the short term.” It is an evolutionary change given NNSA’s mission at Savannah River is growing while Environmental Management’s will decrease over time.
During the past year, NNSA accounted for 51% of the work at Savannah River and Environmental Management 47%, according to slides presented on Tuesday by Michael Budney, Environmental Management’s top boss at the South Carolina complex.
NNSA plans to build the larger of its two plutonium pit factores at the Savannah River Site. Not only would the Savannah River Plutonium Pit Processing Facility’s planned pit output be greater than a pit factory now under construction at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, its associated waste streams would be larger, according to an environmental study the agency published in 2020.
