Local residents must retain a voice in what goes on at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina after federal responsibility for the complex shifts to the semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration in 2025, the head of the Citizens Advisory Board said Monday.
Last month, DOE confirmed its Office of Environmental Management will start gradually transferring control of the 310-square-mile property near Aiken, S.C. to the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) next year, a process that should be finished by the end of fiscal 2025.
“This transfer of control,” of Savannah River to NNSA from the Environmental Management office should ensure “that the voices of stakeholders are still being heard and there is a mechanism for that,” said Gregg Murray, who chairs the Citizens Advisory Board. The board meeting from Augusa, Ga., was streamed online via youtube.
Murray’s comments followed a brief transition overview by Jimmy (Mac) McMillian, assistant manager for infrastructure and environmental stewardship, for the nuclear cleanup office at Savannah River. McMillian said the advisory board will be kept in the loop as the changeover occurs. When there is “concrete valid information to share, we will share that with the CAB,” McMillian said of the Citizens Advisory Board.
The NNSA is taking over the site at a time when the semi autonomous nuclear-weapons agency is preparing to make new nuclear-weapon cores called pits at the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility, which NNSA plans to build from the partially completed Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility. The pit mission is supposed to ramp up in the 2030s, not long before the Office of Environmental Management expects its big liquid-waste cleanup mission at the site to start winding down.
To ensure continuity in the nearterm, the DOE recently extended the contracts for both the prime that oversees daily operations at Savannah River as well as the security provider for the federal property, McMillian said.
The DOE has agreed to extend Fluor-led Savannah River Nuclear Solutions for four more years plus the possibility of an additional one-year option by the federal agency, which could keep the landlord contractor in place through September 2027, McMillian said. Likewise, the Centerra Group security contract is being extended for up to two more years, through Oct. 7, 2024.
Savannah River Nuclear Solutions has been the prime contractor at the site since August 2008 under an agreement now valued at $28.5-billion. Centerra has provided security at Savannah River since October 2009 under a contract now valued at $1.6 billion.
