The National Nuclear Security Administration on Tuesday officially announced Michael Mikolanis as its new top federal official at the agency’s Savannah River Site field office near Aiken, S.C.
The Exchange Monitor reported in December that Mikolanis would make the move to the Savannah River Site from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The NNSA announced Mikolanis’ arrival in a press release. At Savannah River, Mikolanis will manage the federal field office that oversees the site’s much larger contractor base.
Mikolanis was most recently the manager for the DOE Office of Environmental Management’s Los Alamos Field Office, where he oversaw cleanup of radioactive waste from the Manhattan Project and the Cold War. DOE in 2014 decided to separate the lab’s cleanup work from the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) much larger lab operations contract.
With Savannah River Site’s nuclear-weapons mission on the upswing and its liquid-waste cleanup mission run by DOE’s Office of Environmental Management set to be substantially complete by the middle or late 2030s, DOE decided after years of back-and-forth between NNSA and the cleanup branch to give the weapons agency control of most of the site by the Georgia line.
The NNSA planned to take over Savannah River Site’s site-management contract after Oct. 1, 2025. This year, the agency planned to start a competition to replace the incumbent Fluor-led Savannah River Nuclear Solutions.
The NNSA planned to build the larger of its two planned plutonium pit plants at the Savannah River Site from the partially completed Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility. The rechristened Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility could take until 2035 to build and cost as many as $25 million, the NNSA said in its fiscal year 2025 budget request.
Once the Savannah River pit plant is completed, the NNSA plans for workers at the factory to annually cast at least 50 of the fissile first-stage nuclear cores called pits there.
