It also guarantees Russian storage of plutonium in pit forrn. The second option is to convert the pits into plutonium fuel for use in civilian reactors that produce electricity. They are also lobbying Congress for authority to extract plutonium from American utilities' spent fuel. Westinghouse, which runs Savannah River for the Energy Department, is promoting such a scheme. Some 300 tons of plutonium could be extracted from power-reactor spent fuel at Savannah River, shipped in to Pantex for fabrication into MOX fuel and shipped out to MOX reactor sites.
Plutonium is the most toxic man-made substance.
Pantex personnel would have to get used to handling plutonium, not in the form of hermetically sealed pits but as powder or dust that easily sticks to surfaces. A speck of it in the lungs is a cancer dose. The United States abandoned domestic reprocessing and MOX industries more than a decade ago for economic, safety and non-proliferation reasons. Plutonium pits would be shipped from Pantex in military transport vehicles to Savannah River. There the pits would be converted into a form suitable for dissolving plutonium in a molten glass mixture of highly radioactive waste, or for placing plutonium in cans that would be inserted in canisters before the molten waste solution is poured.