Following a five-month pause, plutonium downblending resumed in mid-March at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
The mission involves dilution of 6 metric tons of nuclear weapon-usable, non-pit plutonium, and not the 34 metric tons of material intended to be processed by Savannah River’s MOX program.
Operations began in September 2016, overseen by site management and operations contractor Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS). Facilities at K Area apply inhibitor materials to decrease the potency of the plutonium, eliminating its ability to power nuclear weapons. For now, the downblended material is stored on site, but it will eventually be shipped to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., for permanent disposal.
Savannah River Nuclear Solutions had downblended about 16 kilograms, or 0.016 metric tons, before work was stopped in October 2017 to allow personnel to perform planned destructive examinations of storage containers. Destructive examinations are analysis techniques used to evaluate the properties of materials, components, or systems to ensure safe storage of the material, DOE Savannah River spokesman Monte Volk said by email.
There was no immediate word on how much has been downblended since the restart, but the site is expected to process 30 kilograms in this fiscal year, Volk said. Fiscal 2018 ends on Sept. 30.
The downblending mission is expected to last until 2046. It is unclear how much it will cost, but funding comes from the site’s nuclear materials line item. “We are working on future-year cost projections for downblending, but we do not have those figures at this time,” Volk wrote.
In the current omnibus budget, Savannah River funding streams for nuclear materials and risk management were rolled into one budget line of $483 million, with no clarity on how much was allotted for each mission. The Energy Department’s original fiscal 2018 request for nuclear materials was for $323 million so it is likely that mission is receiving the bulk of the money. Nuclear materials work at the site largely includes processing and storage of foreign and domestic stockpiles of spent nuclear fuel.
Separate from this mission, DOE for now is moving forward with construction of the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) at Savannah River to convert the 34 metric tons of weapon-usable plutonium into commercial nuclear fuel. The department for years has sought to cancel the project, saying it can save years and billions of dollars by employing a substitute “dilute and dispose” approach that would also ultimately ship the material to WIPP. Congress has yet to approve killing the MOX project.
Separately, Savannah River also restarted a spent fuel processing campaign in March. The spent fuel consists of High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) cores, highly enriched uranium (HEU) from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
The Savannah River Site once processed the material decades ago but ceased the operation in 1988 due to changing priorities. Specifically, the Energy Department opted to use facilities to process a different type of spent nuclear fuel.
