WASHINGTON — The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) will decide in early May whether it wants to build nuclear-weapon cores known as plutonium pits at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., the agency’s new administrator said here Wednesday in congressional testimony.
The Pentagon needs the NNSA by 2030 to produce 80 plutonium pits a year to refurbish aging U.S. nuclear warheads. The Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico is building new facilities intended to crank out 30 pits annually by 2026, but the NNSA is weighing whether the remaining 50 could be made at Savannah River.
In testimony before the Senate Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee Wednesday, NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty told lawmakers the results — in draft form, anyway — are in from the engineering analysis the agency will use to decide whether a pit move is possible.
Parsons Government Services — which conducted the analysis for the NNSA’s Office of Acquisition and Project Management under an enterprise construction management services contract awarded in 2017 — is “going to be reviewing the final draft data in the next week or so,” Gordon-Hagerty said during the hearing.
After that, Gordon-Hagerty will receive a final draft briefing and share the results with Ellen Lord, undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment. The NNSA chief said she has already invited Lord to DOE headquarters for that meeting, though she did not say when it would take place.
Through a spokesperson, Gordon-Hagerty declined to speak with Weapons Complex Morning Briefing after the hearing. It was not clear whether the NNSA would actually publish the recommendation Gordon-Hagerty said she expected to make to Deputy Energy Secretary Dan Brouillete by May 11.
The 2014 National Defense Authorization Act authorized the NNSA to improve existing pit-production infrastructure at Los Alamos, and build new facilities when necessary as part of a so-called modular approach to pit production.
“We assumed in the 2014 NDAA this was settled,” Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), ranking member of the full committee, told Gordon-Hagerty. “Yet it seems to have resurfaced again as not a settled issue, but one that’s subject to debate.”
Also during the hearing, Gordon-Hagerty declined to say whether the NNSA planned to start making a low-yield version of the W76 warhead used on submarine-launched Trident II D5 ballistic missiles in 2019.
