The Saxton Plutonium Program

Back in the early 60's, the U.S. considered using plutonium in nuclear power plants in order to achieve a closed fuel cycle. This program was led by the Atomic Energy Commission (the old name for the current Department of Energy) and consisted in having the national labs and industry in reprocessing some of the plutonium that had been produced in nuclear power plants for use as new  fuel as trials in various nuclear power plants. In 1976, Jimmy Carter decided to not continue this program and reprocessing was never used in the nuclear fuel cycle in the U.S. ever since.

In 1994, five years after the end of the Cold War, there was a sentiment expressed collectively by the National Academy of Sciences to the effect that

....With the end of the Cold War, some 50 tons of excess plutonium resulting from the dismantlement of many thousands of nuclear weapons present "a clear and present danger" to international security that must be dealt with promptly?

Not only the U.S. considered their unused weapons plutonium stockpile to be pretty large but they were also "guessing" that Russia had a similar if not larger sotckpile. The "clear and present danger" reflects in part that most people felt that the Russian stockpile was unprotected. and needed to be protected and destroy. An interaction between the two countries ensued at the technical level whereby it was decided to look into the different ways both countries could destroy this excess weapons plutonium in a way that was acceptable by both countries.

Some of the work I was involved in, was in support of this weapons plutonium disposition issue. We went back to the long list of old government reports on some of the 1960's plutonium programs (in particular the Saxton Plutonium Program) and extracted information that would allow us to benchmark the different computational neutronics codes with these past experiments. With Naeem Abdurrahman and Georgeta Radulescu, we eventually published "Benchmark Calculations of the Saxton Plutonium Program Critical Experiments" in Nuclear Technology ( Vol. 127, (3) pp. 315-331, September 1999).