The new administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration is set to visit the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., on Friday, a pair of sources said Wednesday.
A spokesperson for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) in Washington did not immediately reply to a request for comment about Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty’s agenda for the planned trip.
At her confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee last month, Gordon-Hagerty told Weapons Complex Morning Briefing she intended to visit all the NNSA sites in the country. That makes Savannah River Site among her very first stops.
Savannah River Site has a major role in NNSA’s roughly $2-billion-a-year nonproliferation mission, and its roughly $13-billion-a-year nuclear-weapon mission.
For nonproliferation, Savannah River is set — one way or another — to do the heavy lifting involved with disposal of 34 metric tons of surplus weapon-grade plutonium the U.S. is getting rid of as part of an arms-control pact finalized with Russia in 2010.
For weapons, Savannah River Site houses NNSA’s tritium extraction facility, where the agency gets the tritium gas crucial to maintaining the specified explosive yield of nuclear warheads.
Savannah River Site might also get part of the NNSA’s plutonium pit-manufacturing mission: the mission Gordon-Hagerty has said will be her top priority as administration. NNSA has not made a pit since 2011, but is set to resume manufacture at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico next decade. However, NNSA has examined moving at least some pit production to Savannah River Site, possibly by converting MFFF into a pit plant.
