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United States I: All Surplus Plutonium to Be Used in Reactors, Bush Decides The Bush administration today announced its decision to dispose of 34 tons of surplus weapon-grade plutonium by converting it into fuel for nuclear reactors. “Focusing on proven technologies to eliminate this material, reducing costs in the process and keeping our commitment to national security and the cleanup of former weapons sites is the right path to follow,” said U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham in a press release (DOE release, Jan. 23). The plan calls for building two factories at the Energy Department’s Savannah River site in South Carolina to convert plutonium from nuclear warheads into an oxide form to mix with uranium oxides to form mixed oxide fuel for nuclear power plants. The Bush plan rejects part of an earlier Clinton administration plan, which would have disposed of eight tons of plutonium by mixing it with radioactive waste and permanently storing the material while converting the rest into fuel. At a total cost of $3.8 billion, the Bush plan would cost almost $2 billion less than the Clinton plan, a senior Bush administration official said yesterday. The Clinton plan’s price tag was estimated at $2.3 billion in 1996 but had grown to $6.6 billion by last summer, the Times reported. Criticism of the Plan Nuclear nonproliferation advocates expressed concern that recycling plutonium would make U.S. efforts to dissuade other countries from purifying plutonium more difficult. Converting the weapon-grade plutonium into commercial reactor fuel would create a security risk by transferring the plutonium to the commercial sector, said Tom Clements of the Nuclear Control Institute. Clements also expressed concern that conversion would create technical and environmental difficulties that the Energy Department has often failed to solve, and an accident involving plutonium could be more dangerous than one involving uranium. Potential South Carolina Support South Carolina Governor Jim Hodges, however, said the plan sounded “promising.” Hodges threatened last summer to call on state troopers to prevent potential Energy Department shipments of plutonium to the Savannah River site in South Carolina (see GSN, Dec. 6, 2001). Hodges was concerned that the Energy Department planned to store plutonium at the site indefinitely, according to the Times. Most of the funds allocated under the plan to convert the plutonium would be spent in South Carolina, the Times reported (Matthew Wald, New York Times, Jan. 23).
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