NNSA kicks can on facility crucial to disposing of old warhead cores

October 20, 2023
By Dan Leone

The National Nuclear Security Administration’s drive to make new nuclear-weapon cores has delayed disposal of old ones, according to an agency statement emailed to the Exchange Monitor on Tuesday.

Amid the expansion of the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s PF-4 Plutonium Facility and early work on South Carolina’s planned Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility, which combined are supposed to be able to make at least 80 plutonium pits by the 2030s, the semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear weapons agency decided it cannot build a new Pit Disassembly and Processing facility until next decade.

The disassembly facility, to be located either at Los Alamos or the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., is part of the agency’s Surplus Plutonium Disposition Program: a drive to permanently de-weaponize and dispose of 34 metric tons of surplus plutonium. Some of this plutonium is in the form of pits, the fissile first stage of nuclear-weapon first stages.

“After analyzing options for expanding a pit disassembly and processing (PDP) capability for the Surplus Plutonium Disposition Program and considering the high volume of construction projects across the Nuclear Security Enterprise, NNSA has decided to delay starting the PDP capital line-item project until the early/mid 2030s,” an NNSA spokesperson wrote Tuesday in an email. “This will allow for further progress on other major construction projects across the Enterprise.”

How long a delay that constitutes was unclear.

The Energy Communities Alliance, an interest group for locales near DOE nuclear-weapon sites, on Monday said it amounted to a 10-year delay. The Alliance disclosed the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) decision about the facility in a widely distributed email.

Meanwhile, “NNSA will continue to execute its [Surplus Plutonium Disposition] mission using existing facilities,” the agency spokesperson said Tuesday.

The agency currently oxidizes plutonium metal at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, ships the resulting plutonium oxide to the Savannah River Site, where it is diluted with an adulterant and packaged for disposal, then sends the diluted oxides to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico for burial deep underground as transuranic waste.

DOE started shipping these tranches of surplus plutonium to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in December. The agency has since sent more than 500 drums for burial, public data from the disposal site show.

The Pit Disassembly and Processing project will cost about $3.5 billion, the NNSA estimated in its 2025 budget request, though that figure is not set in stone. From 2024 through 2027, the NNSA expected to spend a little more than $350 million. The agency requested $45 million for the project this year and had forecast a big spending spike by 2026, to $120 million annually.

The NNSA expected the Pit Disassembly and Processing project to hit its critical design 1 milestone in fiscal year 2024, which began Oct. 1. That is the point in the Department of Energy’s project management rules where personnel set a rough cost and schedule range, which is further refined at critical decision 2 with what is sometimes called a congressionally binding commitment.