A COVID-19 scare that shut down construction of the Surplus Plutonium Disposition Project at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina for about two weeks, with work resuming in mid-April, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) said Tuesday.
“On April 6, an SPD [Surplus Plutonium Disposition] construction worker called in sick. In an abundance of caution, construction was suspended the same day,” a spokesperson for agency headquarters in Washington, D.C., said by email. “The worker was tested for COVID-19 and was negative. Construction work resumed on April 20.”
The independent federal Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) first disclosed the work stoppage at the future plutonium-disposal site at Savannah River’s K-Area. In a weekly site report, the board reported that contractor Savannah River Nuclear Solutions halted work after some personnel “raised concerns” about the facility’s ongoing construction during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Construction during this fiscal year is limited to “demolition and removal of existing equipment, installation of barriers, and new openings for construction access,” a different NNSA spokesperson in Washington said Wednesday in an email.
The Savannah River Site overall has had 13 confirmed cases of COVID-19 since the virus hit U.S. shores in January. The NNSA typically discloses only confirmed cases, but the Surplus Plutonium Disposition episode illustrates how the pandemic response can alter work schedules unexpectedly, even if the virus isn’t detected at a specific facility.
The NNSA’s multi-site Surplus Plutonium Disposition Program is intended to dispose of 34 metric tons of weapon-usable material that was originally to be converted into commercial reactor fuel using the now-canceled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at Savannah River.
Savannah River’s Surplus Plutonium Disposition Project is the South Carolina site’s part of that work, which calls for blending chemically weakened plutonium oxide with an inert material called stardust, then sending the resulting mixture to DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., to be buried forever, deep underground.
The NNSA expects the planned Savannah River facility to begin operating in 2028, and to continue packing and shipping diluted plutonium for disposal into the 2040s.
Savannah River’s Surplus Plutonium Disposition Project reached Critical Decision 1 in December. Congress appropriated nearly $80 million for the project in 2020, as requested. The NNSA seeks $150 million for the project in fiscal year 2021, which begins Oct. 1. The NNSA thinks it will cost between $448 million and $620 million to build the facility at Savannah River.
The NNSA estimates the entire Surplus Plutonium Disposition Program will cost about $20 billion over its life — 2019 through 2050 — compared with about $50 billion for the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, according to a 2018 report by the agency’s program-independent Cost Estimating and Program Evaluation Office.
The Plutonium Facility (PF-4) at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico is the other key cog in the Surplus Plutonium Disposition Program. The facility will break down surplus plutonium pits — the fissile primary stages of nuclear weapons — and turn that plutonium metal into oxides for processing at Savannah River. That work is competing for floor space in PF-4 with the higher-priority mission to produce new pits.
