ALEXANDRIA, VA – The lead parent company of Savannah River Nuclear Solutions could take over construction of the Savannah River Site’s planned plutonium pit factory, with plenty of opportunities for subcontracting, an official with the site’s prime contractor said here Monday.
“We’re looking at it, but I’m not going to stand here and say that that’s where we’re going to go, yet,” Dennis Carr, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, said after a panel discussion here. “At a minimum, I can tell you it will involve significant subcontracting.”
Carr, himself a Fluor vice president before heading to the site prime in 2018, mentioned the parent’s strategy in response to a question from Christine Gelles, the senior vice president of operations for DOE contractor Longenecker & Associates and the former DOE associate deputy assistant secretary for waste management in Washington.
Fluor, which is already doing designing work on the planned Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility, is “prepared to step up to self perform and self execute” the pit plant’s construction and has started drafting a project labor agreement for DOE “just focused on this construction activity.”
Savannah River Nuclear Solutions comprises Fluor, Huntington Ingalls Industries, and Honeywell. The company’s Savannah River Site management and operations contract, awarded in 2008 and worth some $15.8 billion, includes the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) nuclear weapons work at the site.
With the NNSA and the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management at odds over the exact parameters of the next Savannah River Site management and operations contract, Savannah River Nuclear solutions was set remain on site at least through September.
Late last year, the Office of Environmental Management, which owns the site management and operations contract, indefinitely postponed a competition for a follow-on management pact, citing in part the NNSA’s expanding mission at the site.
The NNSA plans a pair of plutonium pit factories to supply new fissile cores for refurbished nuclear weapons throughout the century, starting next decade with the W87-1: the planned replacement for the W78 intercontinental ballistic missile warhead.
W87-1 will be the second warhead fitted to the planned Ground Based Strategic Deterrent missiles, which were to begin replacing Minuteman III in 2030 or so. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is the design agency for the W87-1, and the other silo-based missile warhead, W87-0.
Meanwhile, Los Alamos National Laboratory’s pit factory, to be built as part of an expansion of the site’s PF-4 Plutonium Facility, was scheduled to begin producing multiple war-usable pits starting in fiscal year 2024, which begins Oct. 1, 2025.
The Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility, to be built from what Carr called the “formidable” steel-and-concrete frame of the canceled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, will be finished between 2032 and 2035, the NNSA now estimates.
The Pentagon says it requires at least 80 pits a year starting in 2030, but that goal has appeared to be in doubt since early 2021, when the NNSA conceded the Savannah River plant likely would not be ready by then. Los Alamos is supposed to be able to cast at least 30 pits a year by 2026. Savannah River is supposed to cast 50 pits annually as soon as it opens.
