ALEXANDRIA, Va. — The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) management contractor for the Savannah River Site plans by June to finalize the design for a new plant capable of making 50 plutonium nuclear-warhead cores a year, the company’s president said here Wednesday.
The conceptual design report for the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility (SRPPF), to be built in South Carolina by repurposing the canceled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, should be finished by June 30, according to a slide briefed at the ExchangeMonitor’s Nuclear Deterrence Summit by Stuart MacVean, president and CEO of the Fluor-led Savannah River Nuclear Solutions.
The report is a major milestone in what the NNSA and its industry partners acknowledge is a challenging and unprecedented effort to convert a facility intended for fabrication of commercial reactor fuel into one capable of casting the fissile cores of future W87-1 intercontinental ballistic missile warheads.
The NNSA wants the SRPPF and an upgraded Plutonium Facility at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico to produce 80 pits annually by 2030. Los Alamos would begin manufacturing in 2024 at 10 pits a year, ramping up to 30 annually by 2026. The SRPPF would be on the hook for 50 pits a year, starting in 2030.
The NNSA has said it wants the plant to reach the Critical Decision 1 (CD-1) milestone no later than Sept. 30. At that point, the agency will have approved the final plan to repurpose the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, and approved an acquisition strategy for the pit plant. For now, the money to design SRPPF is flowing into Savannah River Nuclear Solutions’ prime contract, which last year was extended through Sept. 30, 2020.
The Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management owns the contract, and the NNSA passes money through it. The office holds a pair of one-year options on the incumbent’s deal that could stretch it through September 2022.
The NNSA plutonium work will not be funded through the Savannah River Site Integrated Mission Completion Contract that the Office of Environmental Management is planning. The office released a draft statement of work for that procurement on Thursday.
Congress appropriated more than $400 million for the SRPPF in 2020. The NNSA had not released its detailed budget request for fiscal 2021 at deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor, but the agency seeks a roughly $19.8 billion top line and more than $15.5 billion for the Weapons Activities account that includes pits. The requested Weapons Activities budget would rise by roughly $3 billion from the 2020 appropriation, and the NNSA has said pit production is its top priority.
The agency estimates the split-state pit complex will cost about $30 billion to operate over a 50-year life. Each facility is supposed to be capable of “surging” production beyond the targeted 30- and 50-pit-a-year floors, but the NNSA has not said whether either facility could meet the 80-pit mandate alone.
The W87-1 is the warhead for the future Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent: the silo-based replacement for the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile. The Air Force wants to start deploying the next-generation missiles around 2030, eventually replacing all 400 deployed Minuteman IIIs.
The service plans to procure a total of 666 Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent missiles, including units for flight tests and spares. The program would cost about $100 billion over its 50-year life, of which about $25 billion would go to the engineering and manufacturing development contract to build the missiles — an award Northrop Grumman looks like a lock to win this summer after Boeing declined to bid last year.
