ARLINGTON, Va. — The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) will hone its acquisition approach for the plutonium-pit plant to be built at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina around September 2020, a long-time agency contractor said here Wednesday.
Fluor-led Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, the Savannah River Site management contractor, is on the hook to turn in a Critical Decision (CD) 1 to the NNSA by the end of the government’s 2020 fiscal year, Gregory Meyer, Fluor’s senior vice president for operations in the environmental and nuclear group, said during a question-and-answer session here at the ExchangeMonitor’s annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit.
CD-1 is the project management milestone at which the Department of Energy sets its acquisition approach for a project and completes a detailed analysis of alternatives that justifies the agency’s strategy for meeting a certain mission need. It also establishes a preliminary cost estimate for a project, but that typically is not revealed to the public; official cost estimates follow at CD-2. CD-4 marks the end of construction on a project, and the start of operations.
After a protracted legal and political battle, the NNSA in October canceled MOX Services’ prime contract to build the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) and began plans to convert the unfinished plutonium-disposal plant into a factory capable of annually producing 50 warhead cores called plutonium pits by 2030.
Should the NNSA actually turn the MFFF into a pit plant, the work would become a choice plum for industry, and one of the only agency missions up for grabs at Savannah River in the foreseeable future. The other is the agency’s tritium mission, which would be a part of an estimated 10-year, $15-billion Savannah River site-management contract the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management still has not put on the street for bids. Savannah River Nuclear Solutions is on the job at least through July, though its CEO said he anticipates an extension.
Meyer, for his part, thinks the NNSA’s planned pit mission at Savannah River is “achievable.”
But on Tuesday at the summit, former NNSA Deputy Administrator for Defense Programs Everett Beckner called 50 pits a year by 2030 “a high hurdle” to clear.
The Donald Trump administration’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review called on the NNSA to make at least 80 pits a year by that year. The agency subsequently said it would split the work between the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the converted MFFF.
Los Alamos’ Plutonium Facility (PF-4) would start producing war-ready W87-style pits, suitable for land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, by 2026, then ramp up to 30 annually by 2030. The converted MFFF, in this scenario, would open production of war-ready pits at 50 per year in 2030, with help from Los Alamos personnel.
There is some pressure to keep the entire pit production mission at Los Alamos. Last year, then-lab-director Terry Wallace said PF-4 alone could eventually ramp up production to 80 pits annually. Likewise, New Mexico’s U.S. Senate delegation is pressing the NNSA to explain the agency’s plan for giving Los Alamos the entire pit mission, if converting the MFFF does not pan out.
Amid these pressures, no industry players here volunteered an interest in taking on the possible MFFF conversion work. However, one former NNSA official, who spoke alongside Meyer here, laid out some general qualifications that could lead to a winning bid.
“It will take a contractor team that possesses project management skills that can manage and integrate the projects currently with strong management capabilities,” said Douglas Dearolph, Huntington Ingalls Industries vice president of independent performance assurance in the nuclear and environmental group.
The right team would be “integrated” and “inclusive,” said Dearolph, who retired from the NNSA in 2018 after almost a decade as manager of the agency’s Savannah River Field Office.
But even the best team is bound to encounter unforeseen difficulties as the NNSA and its contractors delve deeper into the agency’s unprecedented plan to turn a plutonium disposal plant into a pit-production machine, Dearolph warned.
“This will not be easy and if not done precisely will erode the actual benefit of having inherited a partially constructed structure,” he said. “This will be a unique challenge.”
