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Book Description
The Department of Energy (DOE) has declared approximately 38.2 tonnes of weapons-grade plutonium to be excess to the needs of national security, 14.3 tonnes of fuel- and reactor-grade plutonium excess to DOE needs, and anticipates an additional 7 tonnes to be declared excess to national security needs. Of this 59.5 tonnes, DOE anticipates that ~ 7.5 tonnes will be dispositioned as spent fuel at the Geologic Repository and ~ 2 tonnes will be declared below the safeguards termination limit and be discarded as TRU waste at WIPP. The remaining 50 tonnes of excess plutonium exists in many forms and locations around the country, and is under the control of several DOE Offices. The Materials Disposition Program (MD) will be receiving materials packaged by these other Programs to disposition in a manor that meets the spent fuel standard. For disposition by immobilization, the planned facilities will have only limited capabilities to remove impurities prior to blending the plutonium feedstocks to prepare feed for the plutonium immobilization ceramic formation process, Technical specifications are described here that allow potential feedstocks to be categorized as either acceptable for transfer into the MD Immobilization Process, or unacceptable without additional processing prior to transfer to MD. Understanding the requirements should allow cost benefit analyses to be performed to determine if a specific material should be processed sufficiently shipment to WIPP. Preliminary analyses suggest that about 45 tonnes of this material have impurity concentrations much lower than the immobilization acceptance specifications. In addition, approximately another 3 tonnes can easily be blended with the higher purity feeds to meet the immobilization specifications. Another 1 tonne or so can be processed in the immobilization plutonium conversion area to yield materials that can be blended to provide acceptable feed for immobilization. The remaining 3 tonnes must be excluded in their present form. However, approximately 2 tonnes of this remaining material could be processed in existing DOE facilities to make them acceptable to the immobilization process. This leaves about a tonne that probably should be declared waste and shipped to WIPP. These specifications are written primarily for large lots of material, for example, 100 kg or more of plutonium in the lot. Small lots of material, such as is common for Central Scrap Management Office (CSMO) materials, will have to be handled on a case by case basis.