Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS) said this week it has commissioned a second furnace to prepare for four planned tritium extractions next year at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
The Fluor-led site management and operations contractor said in a press release Tuesday that it fired up a “previously unused” second furnace for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA): DOE’s semiautonomous nuclear weapons steward. The furnaces are used for the actual extraction procedure.
The second furnace was switched on for an extraction that began in June, a spokesperson for Savannah River Nuclear Solutions said by email Wednesday. That was the second of two extractions planned for the 2019 fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. The first furnace has been used for extractions since 2007. Each performed one extraction in fiscal 2019, the spokesperson said, and both furnaces had been installed at the facility prior to the first firing last decade.
Tritium increases the efficiency of thermonuclear weapons. Savannah River Site personnel harvest the radioactive hydrogen isotope from tritium-producing burnable absorber rods rods irradiated in the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar Unit 1 nuclear reactor. The agency has said it plans to begin irradiating rods in Watts Bar Unit 2 in November 2020.
Personnel at Savannah River melt the rods down, extract the tritium created in the reactor, and pack the tritium into new reservoirs to be installed in nuclear weapons at the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas.
After the pair of extractions in 2019, Savannah River’s twin furnaces are slated to perform four extractions in 2020. Between 2021 and 2024, the agency would ramp up to eight extractions annually, according to its 2020 budget request.
“Having a second proven furnace will help us meet the increasing demands of that mission,” Wallis Spangler, senior vice president for NNSA operations and programs at Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, said in the press release.
In 2018, Savannah River personnel conducted two extractions at the tritium facility, each of which involved 300 tritium-producing burnable absorbed rods, according to the NNSA’s 2020 budget request. That is a little more than half the rods irradiated by Watts Bar Unit 1 during the plant’s 15th cycle in fiscal 2018, according to the request.
The NNSA’s tritium budget has risen about $70 million over the past three years. The agency requested $270 million for Tritium Sustainment in the 2020 federal budget year that began Oct. 1, up from a requested $205 million for 2019 and less than $200 million for fiscal 2018. The extra extraction cycles planned at Savannah River account for the rise, according to the agency’s 2020 budget request.
The actual 2019 budget for the Tritium Sustainment account was roughly $290 million: Congress, contrary to the NNSA’s request that year, included within the account $85 million to downblend highly enriched uranium into low-enriched uranium that can fuel future irradiation cycles at Watts Bar. Cutting out the uranium downblending funds leaves about $205 million in the account, as requested, for tritium operations.
