The disarmament of excess nuclear weapons in the United States last year resulted in a 25 percent growth in tritium extractions at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, the Augusta Chronicle reported Monday (see GSN, Jan. 6).
"The increase is not from new manufacture," SRS spokesman Jim Giusti said. "It's mostly from recycling activities associated with dismantlement of old weapons."
All U.S. nuclear weapons contain tritium -- a hydrogen gas that boosts the explosiveness of the bomb -- and all maintenance work on reservoirs of the material is performed at Savannah River Site. The gas has a half-life of 12.5 years and has to regularly be refreshed at the facility.
Usually, the Defense Department strips the old tritium from the weapons and then transports it to a secured location at the site. Extra tritium from disarmed weapons is stockpiled at the South Carolina facility.
Savannah River Site handled 1,522 reservoir-equivalent units last year, up 25 percent from 2008, according to a Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board report.
At the end of 2008, the United States had 2,246 "operationally deployed" nuclear warheads, according to the State Department.
Under the 2002 Moscow Treaty, the United States and Russia both agreed to reduce their deployed strategic nuclear arsenals to 2,200 warheads by the end of 2012. Negotiations are reportedly almost finished between the two sides on a separate arms control agreement that would reduce each nation's nuclear stockpile even further (see GSN, Jan. 22).
The U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration in 2009 ordered the SRS Tritium Extraction Facility to stay at levels of optimum readiness.
"We don't man [the extraction facility] full time," Giusti said. "When we get a shipment of irradiated rods we will bring people over to operate the facility to extract the tritium out of it" (Rob Pavey, Augusta Chronicle, Jan. 25).