The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) does not anticipate initiating oversight of a planned plutonium nuclear-warhead core production plant in South Carolina until the National Nuclear Security Administration approves an official cost and schedule estimate for the expected multibillion-dollar 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.
The DNFSB posted Hamilton’s correspondence on its website. The board chair was responding to questions that subcommittee members submitted 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 a new factory to produce plutonium pits on the site of the canceled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
The agency requested $410 million for 2020 to design this plant, which it calls the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility (SRPPF), and bring it to the project management milestone known as Critical Decision 1: identifying a specific design and roughing out a cost estimate.
That alone would take until at least Sept. 30, 2020, according to the NNSA’s most recent budget request. The House Appropriations Committee this week approved a 2020 NNSA spending bill that would provide only about two-thirds of the funding requested for the Plutonium Sustainment account that would pay for SRPPF.
