The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is considering a radical restructuring of its nuclear weapons mission at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, including moving some work to another location.
Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, administrator of the semiautonomous Department of Energy agency, said she must at least consider winding down certain operations at the Aiken, S.C., campus due to a June 7 federal court ruling that stopped the NNSA from turning the site’s Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) — an unfinished plutonium disposal plant — into a factory for fissile nuclear-warhead cores called plutonium pits.
That is according to an internal memo obtained Tuesday by Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor. In it, Gordon-Hagerty said the court’s decision imperiled the NNSA’s ability to produce at least 80 plutonium pits a year by 2030, as the Donald Trump administration requested in February in its 2018 Nuclear Posture Review.
“In light of this injunction, NNSA must reevaluate the viability to execute enduring missions at the Savannah River Site,” Gordon-Hagerty wrote in a memo, dated June 29, to the manager of the NNSA Savannah River Field Office.
Gordon-Hagerty directed a “working group,” comprising officials at Savannah River and NNSA headquarters in Washington, to study at least three options for retooling the NNSA’s weapons mission at Savannah River.
One option is giving the Savannah River Site’s mission to process tritium — an essential feedstock for thermonuclear weapons that is critical to ongoing and future arsenal-modernization programs — to the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., or some other NNSA site. The agency’s contract with Y-12 prime Consolidated Nuclear Security allows it to transfer the tritium mission to Tennessee. The Fluor-led Savannah River Nuclear Solutions oversees the work now at Savannah River, under a separate DOE contract.
The other two options for study are: the NNSA taking over management of the entire Savannah River Site from the current site landlord the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management; and creating a separate contract for all NNSA work at the site, including weapons and nonproliferation operations.
The Environmental Management office currently manages both the Savannah River contract that funds NNSA work at the site and a separate liquid-waste cleanup contract.
Gordon-Hagerty wants the working group to give her an interim briefing on these options by Sept. 27, and a final briefing by Dec. 14, according to the memo. Excluding the MFFF contract, NNSA projects it will spend about $300 million on weapons programs at Savannah River this year, most of which supports the tritium operations program.
An NNSA spokesperson this week doubled down on Gordon-Hagerty’s notion that it is time for the agency to reconsider its role in Aiken, but would not say whether the memo and the study it orders are intended to influence ongoing negotiations in Congress, where lawmakers have thrown down repeated roadblocks to turning MFFF into a pit factory.
“Due to a number of factors, now is a good time to take a comprehensive look at the combined strategic vision of the future of the Savannah River Site,” the NNSA spokesperson said.
The spokesperson likewise did not answer a question about how the MFFF injunction, or a delay in moving pit production to South Carolina, might adversely affect the tritium mission.
One U.S. senator, an ardent and vocal supporter of MFFF, quickly drew his own conclusions, telling Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor that the NNSA’s memo was written purely to intimidate South Carolina.
“Unfortunately, it appears NNSA has decided to continue down a path that punishes South Carolina for its staunch support for one of the most important nuclear non-proliferation agreements ever between the United States and Russia,” a spokesperson for Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) wrote in an email to Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor. “We continue to search for, but cannot find, any logical reason why NNSA would consider moving tritium operations to another site. On its face, the proposed action looks more like a threat issued from a mob boss, not from a government agency like the Department of Energy.”
“Either way, Senator Graham won’t back down from holding NNSA and DOE accountable to the people of South Carolina,” the spokesperson said.
The MFFF is designed to turn 34 metric tons of surplus, weapon-usable plutonium into fuel for commercial nuclear power plants, under an arms-control pact with Russia that was finalized in 2010 after about a decade of negotiations. The agreement called on Russia to get rid of an equal amount of military-grade plutonium.
The NNSA thinks the MFFF will be too expensive to complete and has proposed an alternative plutonium-disposal plan that would free the agency to use the partially built MFFF to achieve the Donald Trump administration’s goal of producing at least 80 plutonium pits a year by 2030.
Meanwhile, in a July 3 response to Gordon-Hagerty’s memo, the head of the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management suggested that NNSA’s proposed review of the Savannah River Site “should be integrated” with an ongoing review the cleanup office is conducting of its roughly $7-billion-a-year Cold War cleanup mission.
“Current EM [Environmental Management] landlord status, Savannah River National Laboratory mission and scope, budget and acquisitions should inform the ongoing NNSA working group discussions,” reads the July 3 memo to Gordon-Hagerty from Anne White, assistant energy secretary for environmental management.
The reply memo to Gordon-Hagerty was sent through White’s boss, Undersecretary for Science Paul Dabbar, who also signed the document. The local Aiken Standard newspaper first obtained the July 3 reply memo.
The Environmental Management office, through a spokesperson, declined to say whether it thought the NNSA had the authority to assume landlord status of the Savannah River Site.
“The Office of Environmental Management routinely engages with NNSA and other DOE entities on the most efficient operation of sites in which there are shared equities, such as at the Savannah River Site, to continue to provide best value for the taxpayer and serve as a good steward of public resources,” the Environmental Management spokesperson wrote in an email.
