New Mexico not keen to take South Carolina’s plutonium wastes

LETHAL LEGACY, The US wants to bury SC’s plutonium stockpile forever. Its new home isn’t sure it wants it. Post and Courier, By Thad Moore tmoore@postandcourier.com Nov 23, 2019 In the time it will take for South Carolina’s stockpile of weapons-grade plutonium to decay, you could repeat most of human history, starting back in the Stone Age.

By the time its byproducts lose the explosive potential to be used in nuclear weapons, some 7 billion years will have passed. The Earth itself will have doubled in age, and then some.

The U.S. government will officially decide in the next few years where the plutonium — the metal used to trigger nuclear weapons — will spend that eternity. And when it does, it will ask another part of the country to bear a profound burden: to house thousands of barrels filled with scraps of the Cold War and America’s nuclear arms race, a legacy that may well outlast our civilization.

That question will soon be posed to New Mexico, where the U.S. Department of Energy has excavated cavernous vaults deep below the ruddy soil in the state’s southeastern corner. The government hopes it will eventually hold tons of plutonium it has decided it no longer needs — enough to build a few thousand bombs the size of the one dropped over Nagasaki, Japan.

If it says yes, trucks will carry the plutonium load by load down Interstate 20 for the next three decades, and workers will lower it almost half a mile underground, where it will await its final fate: the mine’s slow collapse, and salt entombing it forever.

If New Mexico says yes, the Energy Department will bury some 20,000 steel drums deep underground there, in a ribbon of salt as thick as Charleston’s Ashley River is wide.

And if New Mexico says yes, South Carolina will secure a new home for a nuclear stockpile it was wary of taking in the first place.

The problem is, New Mexico isn’t sure if it will say yes.

A new path

The U.S.’s policy for disposing of plutonium has been in limbo for years.

Congress had long planned to burn the material in commercial power plants, altering its atomic structure and making it harder to use in bombs.

But the Energy Department’s project to convert plutonium into reactor fuel was deeply flawed: It started building a factory to do that work before it had a complete design, and it later discovered that finishing the plant would cost billions more than expected and stretch into the middle of the century.

So the department proposed an alternative. It would convert its plutonium into a fine powder, and it would hire dozens of people in South Carolina to dilute it by hand, working in shifts around the clock.

They would blend it with a secret combination of chemicals called “stardust,” designed to make it difficult to get the plutonium back out. When mixed with plutonium, stardust is said to foam up, create a gel and harden like concrete. Department officials have said the final product looks like sand on the beach. They’ve said it would save billions of dollars……….

A long decay

The Department of Energy grappled in the early 1990s with just how long WIPP’s legacy would survive.

It hadn’t decided yet that plutonium should spend an eternity in the New Mexico desert, but it knew that America’s other nuclear waste would persist as long as anyone could comprehend. And it worried that some far-off civilization would find WIPP without understanding the invisible danger of radiation inside………When the calendar reaches the year 12000 — around the end of the team’s 10,000-year mandate — the plutonium underground will be less than halfway through its first half-life.

The stockpile that currently sits in South Carolina will still be more than 200,000 years from completing its transformation into a potent type of uranium that is capable of powering cities or destroying them…… https://www.postandcourier.com/news/the-us-wants-to-bury-sc-s-plutonium-stockpile-forever/article_cbe6029e-07eb-11ea-9622-639a44471d1a.html

November 25, 2019 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | - plutonium, Reference, USA

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