US to move bomb-related plutonium to one location

WASHINGTON, Sept 6 (Reuters) The US government will move all surplus nuclear weapons plutonium to one site in South Carolina to save on storage costs and improve security, the Energy Department said yesterday.

It said the decision to consolidate the radioactive material in one place was taken partly because of security concerns raised by the Sept 11, 2001 attacks.

About 2,300 plutonium storage containers from the department's Hanford site in Washington state and 700 similar containers from the national laboratories in Los Alamos, New Mexico and Livermore, California will be sent to the Savannah River site in South Carolina, the department said.

Assistant Energy Secretary James Rispoli, speaking to reporters in a conference call, declined to say for security weapons exactly how much plutonium would be shipped but each container is about the size of a large coffee can and can hold up to 9.7 pounds of plutonium.

A majority of the containers will not be full, he said.

At the end of the Cold War the government declared large quantities of plutonium and uranium that were in the process of being used in weapons as surplus to US defense needs.

Rispoli said putting all the material one place would ''reduce the number of sites with special nuclear material, enhancing the security of these materials and reducing the costs associated with plutonium storage, surveillance and monitoring, and security at multiple sites.'' After processing at Savannah River, some of the material could be sold as fuel for nuclear power plants and the remaining waste will be permanently disposed of at the planned Yucca Mountain nuclear depository in Nevada, he said. The Yucca storage site won't be open for at least a decade.

Removing the surplus plutonium from Hanford alone would avoid having to spend 200 million dollar in security upgrades, as well as ten of millions of dollars more each year for security and monitoring, the department said.

The department will begin shipping the material in 30 days, with all the surplus plutonium expected to be at the Savannah River site by 2010.

REUTERS PBB RN0411