MEGATONS TO MEGAWATTS

Materials Management

Converting Weapons-Grade Materials to Peaceful Products

The ARIES Demonstration Line -- Advanced Recovery and Integrated Extraction System -- integrates the technologies needed to remove plutonium from the cores of surplus nuclear weapons and convert the plutonium into an unclassified form for international inspection. The plutonium is packaged for long-term storage and disposition.

Creating Mixed-Oxide Fuel

ARIES uses hydrogen and/or oxygen gas to recover the plutonium from the pits that are at the heart of nuclear weapons. The plutonium pit falls apart in flakes, which are collected and formed into plutonium oxide. The plutonium oxide will either be blended with other materials to make a mixed oxide, which will be burned in existing domestic reactors as fuel and disposed of as spent fuel, or it will be disposed of by being immobilized and surrounded by vitrified high level waste. Both of these technologies form the basis for the United States' hybrid plutonium disposition strategy aimed at making the plutonium no longer useable for nuclear weapons.

ARIES

Processing Pits by Remote Control

The ARIES Project uses an integrated system to perform all of the necessary tasks -- cutting the pits apart, separating the plutonium from other components with gas, converting the plutonium to an oxide form, packaging it in sealed containers, decontaminating and determining the characteristics of the resulting product.