Nuclear Materials

This fact sheet describes the methods and facilities that the Department of Energy (DOE) uses to process plutonium for use in nuclear weapons. Plutonium is not found in nature and has to be artificially produced. DOE no longer manufactures new plutonium, however. Instead, it processes and recycles the plutonium from retired nuclear weapons and the plutonium that remains as scrap or residue from plutonium processing. In summary, DOE recovers plutonium in two main ways--aqueous and pyrochemical--at four processing sites. Due to environmental and safety concerns and cuts in the numbers of nuclear weapons, only the Los Alamos processing facility is now up and running.

GAO found that: (1) DOE uses two basic processes for recovering plutonium, the aqueous and pyrochemical processes, at four processing sites; (2) because of environmental and safety concerns and reductions in nuclear weapons, DOE has closed most of its processing facilities, and only the processing facilities at Los Alamos are currently operating; (3) sites which formerly produced plutonium or processed it into nuclear weapons components all used aqueous processing and bomb reduction, but varied in their use of the other pyrochemical processes; (4) deciding whether or not a particular type of scrap will be processed to recover plutonium primarily depends on how the cost to process the plutonium compares with the cost to dispose of the scrap as radioactive waste; and (5) the degradation of the nuclear weapons complex and the end of the Cold War have reduced the need for nuclear weapons and plutonium, and will affect decisions as to which plutonium processing plants will resume operations.