After failing to build a plutonium recycling plant at the Savannah River Site after 20 years of planning and billions spent, the chair of the House Armed Services Committee said Tuesday he has doubts about whether the National Nuclear Security Administration can turn the failed project into a plutonium pit factory.
“I do not trust Savannah River,” said Smith, referring to the DOE site in Aiken, S.C., where the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has proposed turning the moribund MOX facility into the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility. “I’ve been down to see the building down there and I don’t know if you can just convert a MOX facility into a pit production facility.”
Smith made the remarks at a virtual press roundtable hosted by the Washington-based Defense Writers Group. He spoke to reporters a day after the NNSA approved the Savannah River pit plant’s critical decision one review, which formalized the agency’s plan to build the factory from partially completed MOX facility — even though this first detailed review of the project revealed it would cost $6.9 billion to $11.1 billion to finish by 2032 or 2035.
The high end of that estimate is two-and-a-half times more expensive and five years later an estimate NNSA floated publicly in 2018.
Yet for all Smith’s bite at Tuesday’s press event, he also appeared to endorse more or less that same pit production strategy the NNSA has proposed for the next decade or so, which involves beginning production of new pits at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 2024 and ramping up to 30 pits annually by 2026.
“I’ve also heard that it’s possible that we could get more than 30 a year out of Los Alamos,” Smith said Tuesday. “So I’m not going to exaggerate that, but you could get potentially 40 or 50. I think that is where we should focus our efforts in the near term, and the near term is like a decade.”
The NNSA by law has to have its pit-production complex ready to produce 80 pits annually by 2030. In June, the agency’s acting administrator, Charles Verdon, said the NNSA could not meet that goal because of the projected delay at the Savannah River pit plant — but that the two-pronged pit complex was still the fastest way of hitting the target throughput.
NNSA formalized its plan to build a pair of pit plants in 2018.
