The National Nuclear Security Administration appointed Jason Armstrong to lead the Savannah River Field Office, the semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear-weapon steward wrote in a press release on this week.
Armstrong was most recently assistant manager for nuclear safety and engineering at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Production Office in Tennessee, where he had worked since March 2018. The office oversees both the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas, where the NNSA services all U.S. nuclear weapons, and the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., where the agency makes nuclear weapon secondary stages.
Armstrong has a bachelor’s degree in radiation health physics from Oregon State University.
He now will be the top federal official at the Aiken, S.C., site where the NNSA plans by 2030 to annually cast 50 plutonium pits — the fissile cores of nuclear weapon primary stages — in the planned Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility. NNSA intends to build the facility at the incomplete Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, which the agency cancelled in 2018.
Armstrong replaces Nicole Nelson-Jean, who left the NNSA to join DOE’s Office of Environmental Management in 2020. Most of the Savannah River Site is now part of a liquid-waste cleanup effort run by the Environmental Management Office. The site formerly produced plutonium for Cold War nuclear weapons.
Jeffrey Allison had been the acting NNSA field office manager at Savannah River and has now returned to full time to his post as the site’s deputy manager, the NNSA said Monday.
