Savannah River Nuclear Solutions is laying the groundwork to acquire the three custom-built gloveboxes needed for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Surplus Plutonium Disposition program: the proposed replacement for the cancelled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility.
Under the currently unfunded and unauthorized program, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) would install the gloveboxes at Savannah River Site’s K-Area, where they would help prepare 34 metric tons of surplus, weapon-usable plutonium for permanent deep-underground burial.
With Congress closer than ever to approving the Surplus Plutonium Disposition program, the Fluor-led Savannah River Nuclear Solutions has released a request for information that potential glovebox vendors must respond to by June 21. A company spokesperson confirmed Wednesday that the request is related to the Surplus Plutonium Disposition program.
Savannah River Nuclear Solutions anticipates an award early in the government’s 2020 fiscal year, which barring a sudden legislative push outside the annual authorization and appropriations processes is the soonest Congress could approve Surplus Plutonium Disposition.
NNSA requested $79 million for Surplus Plutonium Disposition in the 2020 fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. The House Appropriations committee has approved that level of funding in a 2020 spending bill awaiting a floor vote. The program would rid the U.S. nuclear stockpile of 34 metric tons of surplus, weapon-usable plutonium that Washington vowed to get dispose of in 2000 as part of a reciprocal materials-reduction pact with Russia.
NNSA has fought since the Barack Obama administration to replace the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) with what is now called Surplus Plutonium Disposition. Congress long resisted the change, but key committees have come around this year, green-lighting the program in draft 2020 appropriations and authorization bills.
Under Surplus Plutonium Disposition, also called dilute-and-dispose, NNSA plans to chemically weaken surplus plutonium at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Savannah River, then mix it with concrete-like grout called stardust at Savannah River. After that, DOE would bury the mixture at its Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.
The Surplus Plutonium Disposition program would initially use only two of its three gloveboxes at a time, an NNSA official told a National Academies Panel in March. The pair would operate for 40 weeks a year, with the third standing in as a spare, or as surge capacity, if that should become affordable.
Surplus Plutonium Disposition would come online in 2028, according to an NNSA roadmap, and take until the late 2040s to process all 34 metric tons of plutonium. MFFF would have turned the plutonium into commercial reactor fuel. NNSA cancelled MFFF in October, citing increasing costs.
The Surplus Plutonium Disposition program would cost about $20 billion over its life — 2019 through 2050 — compared with about $50 billion for MFFF, according to a 2018 report by NNSA’s nominally independent Cost Estimating and Program Evaluation Office. The actual cost could be different, since Congress did not clear NNSA to do anything but study the program in 2019.
Meanwhile, New Mexico’s congressional delegation has said Congress may need to change federal law before NNSA can bury the 34 metric tons of surplus plutonium at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
The 1992 WIPP Land Withdrawal Act stipulates that DOE may inter 176,000 cubic meters of waste in the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. The facility accepts transuranic waste generated by weapons activities: material and equipment contaminated by elements heavier than uranium.
DOE has been looking for ways to better utilize the underground space at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. In December, the agency got one of the breaks it was looking for, when the New Mexico Environment Department modified DOE’s operating permit for the deep-underground repository so that empty space in waste containers no longer counted towards the facility’s space limit.
By that reckoning, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant is only about one third full, rather than one half full. Environmental watchdog groups in New Mexico have challenged the December decision in court. The administration of New Mexico’s new governor, former Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) has not voided the December permit modification granted by the administration of former governor, Susana Martinez (R).
Advocacy groups have appealed the change to the New Mexico Court of Appeals, where a court-directed mediation is about to take place.
