The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) does not anticipate initiating oversight of a planned plutonium warhead core plant in South Carolina until the National Nuclear Security Administration approves an official cost and schedule estimate for the expected multibillion-dollar nuclear facility — a milestone that could be years away.
“I predict that oversight will begin at some point between the Department’s establishment of Critical Decision 2 (Approve Performance Baseline) and Critical Decision 3 (Approve Start of Construction or Execution),” DNFSB Chairman Bruce Hamilton wrote in a letter to the House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee.
In its 2020 budget request, the NNSA said it would take at least until Sept. 30, 2021, to get the proposed Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility (SRPPF) to the design milestone CD-1: the point in the agency’s project management process where the agency finalizes a design and roughs out a cost estimate.
The DNFSB posted Hamilton’s correspondence on its website. In the missive, the board chair said federal law requires DNFSB to weigh in on the SRPPF design before NNSA starts construction. Hamilton’s letter was a response to questions subcommittee members submitted to him after a hearing last month about the Department of Energy’s fiscal 2020 budget request. Critical decision is the term DOE uses to mark milestones for engineering and construction projects, from the identification of a mission need to the final teardown of whatever facility is built to fulfill that need.
The Energy Department and its semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration want to build the SRPPF on the site of the canceled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
As part of a $712 million request for Plutonium Sustainment, the NNSA requested $410 million for 2020 to design the SRPPF. The House Appropriations Committee this week approved a 2020 NNSA spending bill that would provide only about two-thirds of the Plutonium Sustainment funding requested.
The account covers the SRPPF and planned upgrades for a pit production plant at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The House committee’s bill does not forbid work on SRPPF, but the committee-approved level of funding, if signed into law, could force the NNSA either to delay the South Carolina plant, or attempt to pay for the facility’s design with appropriations intended for other agency projects.
Key lawmakers in both chambers of Congress have fretted about the price of the the SRPPF, though the GOP-led Senate Armed Services Committee voted this week to authorize plant. A DOE-chartered analysis of the proposed pit plant published in 2018 found it could cost around $15 billion to build and operate over the next several decades. The Donald Trump administration has told the NNSA to build 80 pits a year by 2030. The agency plans to make 30 of those annually at Los Alamos and the other 50 at the SRPPF. The first new pits would be deployed on future W87-1-style warheads planned to tip future Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent intercontinental ballistic missiles.
The DNFSB inspects active and shuttered DOE nuclear weapon sites — except naval nuclear reactor sites — for health and safety issues that could affect the public. The roughly $30-million-a-year federal agency does not regulate the Energy Department, but it can issue safety recommendations with which the secretary of energy must publicly agree or disagree. The House Appropriations Committee proposed just over $30 million for the board in 2020, about $1 million above the request.
