Merrick & Co. has opened a new office in Aiken, S.C., to support subcontract work on the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) expanding plutonium mission, the Greenwood, Colo., nuclear, defense, and infrastructure contractor said.
Bill Taylor will manage the new Aiken office, the company said in a press release. Taylor spent the last 15 years at CB&I Project Services: the contractor for the now-canceled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) at the Savannah River Site in Aiken.
“Our Aiken presence will allow our clients in the southeast region of the U.S. easy access to our expertise related to nuclear facilities and specialized equipment design for our [country’s] Strategic Materials Programs which include Plutonium, Uranium, Tritium, and Lithium materials,” Tony Wampler, business development manager for Merrick’s Nuclear Services & Technology branch, said in the release.
The NNSA aims to annually produce 80 fissile nuclear-weapon cores called plutonium pits by 2030, split between Savannah River and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. In South Carolina, the agency plans to make 50 pits annually by 2030 by converting the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility into a pit plant — a Pentagon-endorsed deadline the civilian agency has admitted it will be challenged to hit.
There are about nine people in the Aiken office with Taylor, Wampler wrote in an email this week. The office opened in May, but Merrick has been performing performing early Critical Decision 0 work for the NNSA’s planned two-state plutonium pit complex since around November, Wampler said.
That includes “working on the conceptual design of plutonium pit production equipment within” the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, according to Wampler. In Department of Energy project management terminology, Critical Decision 0, or CD-0, refers to the point in NNSA project management at which the agency formally establishes its needs for a given mission — pits, in this case.
Wampler did not disclose the detailed terms of Merrick’s pit work.
A looming opportunity at Savannah River is the Tritium Finishing Facility the NNSA plans to start building in 2022 or so at an estimated cost of just under $550 million. The building will replace aging tritium facilities where NNSA workers harvest the radioactive hydrogen isotope for later insertion into nuclear weapons.
The NNSA is pushing the Tritium Finishing Facility to the CD-1 milestone — affirming the agency’s preferred way of meeting a previously established mission need — by Sept. 30.
Merrick is part of a joint venture with Albuquerque-based Strategic Management Solutions that is one of the subcontractors to Los Alamos lab prime Triad National Security. The partnership has around 30 years’ worth of experience designing and fabricating glove boxes, along with other operations.
Merrick employs about 550 people. Among other things, the company has designed and fabricated glove boxes for the NNSA. The company has about $100 million in annual revenue, of which NNSA work accounts for some 30% to 40%, Wampler said.
