The Savannah River Site has been running a four-shift glove box operation at its main plutonium-disposal program in the site’s K-Area for a little more than a month now, a site spokesperson said this week.
The Aiken, S.C., site ratcheted up to four shifts from two on June 1, the spokesperson wrote Tuesday in an email to Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor. It takes about 48 operators to staff the four shifts in the 15-foot-long glove box, the site said in a press release this week. Savannah River is preparing the plutonium for disposal offsite.
Also in the press release, Savannah River Site (SRS) said it has finished building a storage pad at K-Area to stage barrels of transuranic waste that the plutonium disposal program eventually will produce.
At SRS, the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management is already blending plutonium-contaminated waste with inert material for disposal at the agency’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant deep-underground disposal facility outside of Carlsbad, N.M.
DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration will, later this decade, use essentially the same disposal method to process a 34 metric-ton tranche of plutonium at K-Area as part of the weapons agency’s Surplus Plutonium Disposition program. The program, set to start up in 2028, will replace SRS’ cancelled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) as the agency’s preferred method of getting rid of unneeded plutonium.
In August 2020, the federal government paid South Carolina a roughly $600 million economic assistance payment in exchange for extra time to dispose of plutonium that accumulated at SRS before DOE cancelled MFFF in 2018.
A 2022 spending bill approved Friday would provide $156 million for the surplus plutonium disposition program, which includes projects at both Savannah River and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. That’s even with the 2022 request and about $7.5 million more than the 2021 appropriation.
