The Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility in South Carolina, like its planned counterpart in New Mexico, would be able to handle the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) planned plutonium pit production mission on its own if needed, according to an environmental document released Thursday.
The NNSA draft environmental impact statement also examines the effects of surging production in South Carolina above the agency’s nominal full rate of 80 nuclear-weapon cores a year.
The Pentagon needs the NNSA starting in 2030 to produce at least 80 pits each year. The lion’s share of those, 50 a annually, are supposed to come from the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility (SRPPF) at the Aiken, S.C., Savannah River Site.
In the draft environmental impact statement that examines the environmental consequences of the pit mission at Savannah River, the NNSA said the South Carolina facility could handle the 80 pits a year on its own. The agency also looked at the possible waste streams that would issue from the plant if production cranked up to 125 pits a year.
The NNSA plans to build SRPPF from the partially completed, now canceled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility in the Savannah River Site’s F-Area. The new pit plant is scheduled to have its critical design review in June. The NNSA is funding the work, for now, through site operations contractor Savannah River Nuclear Solutions: a Fluor-led team with Huntington Ingalls Industries.
The SRPPF is not officially on the hook to make 125 or even 80 pits a year. The plan, right now, is for the Los Alamos National Laboratory to start producing pits in 2024, ramping up to 30 annually by 2036. The SRPPF would come online in 2030, producing 50 pits a year. The NNSA has admitted it will be a challenge to open Savannah River for pit production so soon.
Either pit factory could cover for the other, producing at least 80 pits a year alone, the NNSA has said in environmental analyses released this year.
If the pit plants run for 50 years, the NNSA estimates, they will produce a total of more than 30,000 cubic meters of transuranic waste. That would take up roughly a third of the 100,000 cubic meters, or so, that DOE estimates remain available at its primary underground transuranic waste disposal site, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. The Energy Department based its count on the 1992 WIPP Land Withdrawal Act that authorized the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
The SRPPF would produce more waste than the Plutonium Facility at Los Alamos, the NNSA estimates.
Assuming aqueous recovery of plutonium at Savannah River, a step to limit plutonium that has to go to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, making 50 pits a year at the SRPPF would produce about 625 cubic meters of transuranic waste annually. Los Alamos’ Plutonium Facility would produce about 105 cubic meters of transuric waste a year, while making 50 pits annually.
At 80 pits a year, the SRPPF would produce about 920 cubic meters of transuranic waste, compared with about 305 cubic meters of such waste for 80 pits a year at Los Alamos, according to Thursday’s draft environmental impact statement.
The public may comment on the draft environmental impact statement during a 45-day period that began Friday and ends no earlier than May 18, the NNSA said in a press release. There will be a virtual public hearing on the draft document on April, 30. The agency plans to post details about that planned meeting on its website.
Sometime after the public comment period, the NNSA will finalize its latest environmental impact statement.
