U.S. to Add New Surplus Plutonium to Earlier Plans for Conversion Into Reactor Fuel, Official Says

By Greg Webb
Global Security Newswire

VIENNA —  A U.S. official yesterday clarified Monday’s announcement that the United States would remove 9 metric tons of plutonium from the U.S. nuclear arsenal, expressing confidence that the material would be in addition to 34 tons the United States has already committed to eliminate (see GSN, Sept. 17).

U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman announced the move here in a speech to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s annual meeting.  However, his remarks left it unclear whether the 9 tons would constitute an increase or simply a component of the 34 tons Washington has promised to immobilize or burn as mixed-oxide reactor fuel under a bilateral agreement with Russia.

The United States plans to convert most of the material into nuclear fuel to be consumed in nuclear power plants.  The new 9 tons would come entirely from U.S. nuclear warhead cores, or pits, Bodman said

Yesterday, a top National Nuclear Security Administration official said he expected the 9 tons would in fact be added to the 34 already committed.

“When the initial agreement was reached on the 34 metric tons, some amount, 0 to 4 tons, might have had to come from future declarations,” said William Tobey, NNSA deputy administrator for defense nuclear nonproliferation.  “The reason for that was that some amount of the material, which was non-pit plutonium, was in a state that isn’t clear whether it could be run through the MOX facility.

“So we had this plutonium, we knew we were going to dispose of it, we didn’t know whether it had some chemicals in it that would have made it impossible to put it through the MOX facility.  But we didn’t know whether that was 0 or 4 tons,” he continued.

“We’ve done further analysis since then and some more thinking on the material and the facility and exactly what its specifications are,” Tobey added.  “We believe that there’s a good prospect that all or nearly all of this non-pit plutonium can go through the MOX facility.  Therefore the 9 tons will likely be in addition to the 34 metric tons.”

In the mid-1990s, the United States declared that 52.5 metric tons of plutonium under control of the Energy and Defense departments was no longer needed for defense purposes. 

Bodman’s announcement Monday increased that amount to 61.5 tons, leaving about 38 tons of plutonium in U.S. nuclear weapons program, according to nuclear weapons expert Matthew Bunn of Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

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