Kenneth Fletcher
WC Monitor
2/14/2014
There appears to be ongoing discord between senior officials at the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management and Savannah River Site leaders over efforts to promote the “Enterprise SRS” vision for attracting more work to the site, WC Monitor has learned. Enterprise SRS, an effort to bring future business and missions to the site, was launched in 2011 by DOE Savannah River management together with contractor Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, which runs the lab where much of the work would take place. But senior EM headquarters officials became concerned after EM was chastised in late 2012 by the White House Office of Management and Budget for spending cleanup funds on small modular reactors, a highly touted component of Enterprise SRS, officials familiar with the discussions told WC Monitor.
Enterprise SRS has attracted scrutiny from OMB officials, who questioned whether it may be a distraction from EM’s mission of environmental cleanup and were wary of missions that would obligate a cleanup site years into the future. “It’s like drawing a bull’s-eye on the program for OMB,” an official familiar with the talks told WC Monitor. While work has long been executed for other agencies and the private sector at Savannah River National Laboratory, launching a public campaign created problems for an otherwise laudable goal, the official believes. “It was the way it was executed and not the merits of program,” the official said. However, another observer had a different take on the situation. “The concern at SR is that EM HQ is in a state of flux, [and] doesn’t have a stable leadership to push-back or challenge OMB,” that official told WC Monitor.
Despite the issues in 2012, Enterprise SRS continues to be prominently featured in presentations made in recent months by Savannah River leadership. However, it is unclear where the future of the program lies. It is not a funding line item, and instead acts as a brand for a host of potential projects that is centered on a logo and slogan. An EM headquarters spokesman said last week that site officials were never directed to stop discussing Enterprise SRS publicly. However, DOE Savannah River Operations Office Manager Dave Moody, the public face of Enterprise SRS, declined a recent interview request by WC Monitor on the topic.
A Vision For the Site’s Future
With cleanup activities expected to decline in the years ahead, Savannah River began to seek new missions to utilize its workforce and facilities in the future in an effort to prevent the perception that SRS is a “closure site.” As a result, the Enterprise SRS concept was conceived a few months after Moody came to the site in late 2010 as a “transformational strategy” to bridge current work to future missions. “We believe that this would position the site to make a major contribution to the nuclear future of this country,” Moody told WC Monitor when he laid out the strategy in June 2011. “There’s not a successful business that doesn’t build on what it’s good at. And it really means that we’re building on what we’re good at, and those things really deal with nuclear.”
In particular, officials hoped to boost the status of EM-focused SRNL by providing a slew of new missions—with the added bonus of helping share the operations cost of the facility. They laid out a vision that would transform the lab and the site from being cleanup-based to encompassing more work in national security and new energy technologies. The vision encompasses ongoing work at the site, such as nuclear materials disposition and high level waste cleanup, and more controversial speculative projects, such as small modular reactors and research and development on hydrogen-related energy production and used nuclear fuel recycling.
Nobody ‘Thinks it Should Be a Closure Site’
Many locals have been enthusiastic supporters of efforts to create new work at the site. “I just see that the secure acreage there is unparalleled on the East Coast and it simply cannot be recreated,” Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.), whose district includes the site, told WC Monitor last month. Spreading the message on the potential of the site is important, Karen Patterson, Chair of the South Carolina Governor’s Nuclear Advisory Council, told WC Monitor. “I don’t see it as a closure site, nobody else down here sees it as a closure site or thinks it should be a closure site,” she said, noting that there may be different views in other parts of the state. “I think we just need to put the right kind of bugs in their ear about why this is really a good place.”
‘Cleanup is the Budget King’
Some local groups, though, have been much more critical of Enterprise SRS. “It is more of a marketing ploy,” Tom Clements of the South Carolina Chapter of the Sierra Club told WC Monitor. “They are looking back at the glory days of Savannah River and can’t accept that it might be on more of a cleanup path. But they forget that cleanup is the budget king at the site, and they need to make sure it stays that way. I do think that they have lost their focus on that and need to regain it.” He added, “I’ve said many times publicly that Enterprise SRS is a distraction from the main project at the site, which is cleanup.”
However, Shelly Wilson of the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control, which has been harshly critical of the Department in the last year for cutting funds to SRS cleanup, said she does not see Enterprise SRS as a distraction. “I don’t believe that the lack of funding in high-level waste was in any way due to the look at future missions,” she told WC Monitor last week. “We didn’t feel like it was a distraction or really took anything away from the cleanup. Those new missions aren’t something that we have authority over unless a permit is involved. We heavily look at the cleanup. We have been very satisfied with the cleanup pace in the past.”
Are Savannah River SMRs Still an Option?
Among the most controversial aspects of Enterprise SRS have been efforts to lure small reactors to Savannah River. While an SMR has never been licensed and built, in recent years several reactor vendors have been marketed designs for small reactors. Savannah River officials in turn touted the site as a perfect testbed for the new reactors, and announced a goal to have the site largely powered by SMRs in 20 years (WC Monitor, Vol. 22 No. 47). In March 2012, the site said it had signed memoranda of agreement with three reactor vendors—Hyperion, Holtec and NuScale—to explore deploying reactors at the site.
But initial research into SMR deployment was taking place at SRNL using EM funds, a fact that irked the White House OMB, which quashed the work in the fall of 2012. “EM funds must be expended according to Congressional intent, on ongoing cleanup projects of radioactive and hazardous waste on the site and the EM program generally prioritizes its projects based on risk to human health and the environment,” an OMB spokeswoman said at the time (WC Monitor, Vol. 23 No. 48).
With the work on hold, the chances for a small reactor at SRS suffered another setback more recently. In a snub to Savannah River, NuScale, which like SRNS is led by Fluor, gained a DOE grant last December for its SMR but announced it would seek to deploy its project in a western state rather than SRS. The company had originally been enthusiastic about the site, NuScale Chief Commercial Officer Mike McGough told WC Monitor. “We expected that for obvious reasons it would emerge as a viable candidate,” he said. “ But going forward, in order to site a small modular reactor project, you can’t just have a bunch of people sitting around a table saying ‘Boy we’d like to put one of those here.’ You have to have a utility or group of utilities to be the ownership consortium.”
‘A Lot of Confusion’ in DOE on SMR Proposals
NuScale decided to shift its focus in part because talks with South Carolina utilities showed little interest, McGough said. But McGough believes that another factor was involved: Holtec was a competitor for the DOE grants offered for SMR design work—and last year South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley in March threw her support behind Holtec. Soon after that, DOE announced that the first round of SMR funding would not go to either Savannah River proposal, and instead awarded funds to a B&W effort. “Unfortunately, Savannah River and South Carolina chose to be part of two proposals in round one of the DOE funding,” McGough said. “Frankly that caused a lot of confusion among the DOE and we think it may have had a negative effect on the outcome of the first reward. We decided that we weren’t going to do that again.” NuScale went on to apply and win for a second round of funding with a proposal based on a consortium of utilities in western states.
Holtec still plans to move ahead with its plans for an SMR without the DOE funding grant, and is keeping Savannah River as one of several options being pursued. “As far as we’re concerned, as we announced, we are full force ahead, continuing our program,” Pierre Oneid, president of Holtec’s SMR, LLC, told WC Monitor. “The Savannah River option, as far as we know, remains open. In our strategy its still one of the options we completely intend on continuing to pursue.”
For its part, Hyperion is now known as Gen4 Energy, and last November was awarded a DOE grant for research and development into its advanced reactor design. The R&D effort is getting underway at the University of South Carolina. Savannah River remains an option for the company, but it is also open to considering deployment elsewhere, CEO Bob Prince told WC Monitor. “Savannah River saw it as an opportunity for them to reuse parts of the site and stepped forward and did that. I think that was brilliant. Any other site that wants to do that, it’s more than OK with us,” he said. ‘DOE Does Not Toot It’s Horn
Meanwhile, Patterson of the Governor’s Nuclear Advisory Council said more efforts need to be made to gain support for Savannah River’s future. “I know a lot of the legislators in the upstate view it as a negative. They would like to get rid of the Savannah River Site. I don’t think anybody has done the right legwork to make the decisionmakers in the state understand what our resources really could be for the economic drivers,” she said. “They think of it as a Cold War weapons site. DOE does not toot its horn. We don’t ever talk about the good stuff we do particularly. We have to get people away from thinking that it just built nuclear bombs.”
