| Publication |
2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The Energy Department announced last month that it has decided to mothball the facility that has been the centerpiece of its effort to get rid of plutonium from the U.S. nuclear weapons program as the department reviews other options for that task. In public comments by department officials and in budget documents for fiscal year 2015, the department said it was putting the facility into "cold standby," meaning that work on the structure will be scaled back to activities such as protecting the facility and its equipment from the elements and keeping the site secure. Those activities would preserve the facility for some potential future use. The facility is under construction by an Energy Department contractor at the department's Savannah River Site in South Carolina. It is designed to turn the plutonium into mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel-so called because it is a mix of plutonium and uranium oxides-for use in nuclear power reactors.
Under an agreement that Russia and the United States signed in 2000, each country is required to dispose of at least 34 metric tons of surplus weapons plutonium. In the United States, that mission is the responsibility of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), a semiautonomous unit of the Energy Department. The NNSA budget request for fiscal year 2015 would provide $196 million for construction of the MOX fuel fabrication plant and another $25 million for other associated costs, down from $344 million and $40 million appropriated for the current fiscal year. Spending for Fissile Materials Disposition, the section of the NNSA budget that includes those expenditures, would drop from $526 million to $311 million. During a March 4 conference call with reporters, Anne Harrington, NNSA deputy administrator for defense nuclear nonproliferation, said the ongoing analysis of plutonium disposition options had not eliminated the current approach as an option. But keeping that approach would require the facility's total life-cycle costs to decrease considerably, she said. Those costs are now estimated to be about $30 billion, according to the Energy Department.
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