KNOXVILLE — Design of the Savannah River Plutonium Pit Processing Facility is half finished and the facility could be built by 2032, though the date is not set in stone, a senior contractor executive said here Tuesday at an industry gathering.
“You’ve got to put a stake in the sand at some point,” Dennis Carr, chief executive officer of Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS), told the Exchange Monitor. “That’s our rallying cry. That’s going to be my position until such time as I have a design and more accurate view of what the schedule will be.”
Carr spoke at the Energy, Technology and Environmental Business Association’s Business Opportunities and Technical Conference here.
SRNS, the site operations contract overseeing design of the pit facility for the NNSA, is repurposing the existing 430,000-square-foot building that was once the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication.
“Our objective is to convert that facility into a pit-production facility with the goal to bid to CD-4 by 2032,” Carr told conference attendees. “That is an overwhelming task but we are up for that challenge and we are moving down that path.”
Design of the new Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility (SRPPF), which will eventually manufacture at least 50 fissile plutonium pits a year for nuclear-weapon first stages, is about 53% complete, Carr said. That is short of the 60% design completion NNSA advertised in its fiscal 2024 budget request.
Four design teams are working on the SRPPF design, which should be complete next year, Carr said.
Merrick is tasked with providing process design with Fluor, of Greenville, S.C., providing balance-of-plant design. Sandia National Laboratory also is working on element’s of the plant’s design while SRNS internal resources are performing both seismic and structural analysis of the facility and some classified design aspects, Carr said.
Though the Savannah River Site has never made plutonium pits in its history, it will shoulder the largest burden of production when the NNSA eventually begins building 80 per year sometime after 2030. NNSA officials, including Administrator Jill Hruby acknowledge they won’t make that deadline and now often say “as close to 2030 as possible.” The other 30 pits the U.S. military requires to carry out its nuclear deterrence mission will be made at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
Owing to the delays, NNSA Administrator Jill Hruby has said that Savannah River will have to produce more than 50 pits a year when it first switches on.
“We’ve never made a pit,” Carr told the Exchange Monitor. “Going into this, I don’t think we are naive, but we are certainly inexperienced. We need to gain knowledge from other sites.”
Carr said Savannah River is leaning heavily on Los Alamos nuclear engineers’ institutional knowledge of pit manufacturing, the legacy of building nukes at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and former employees of the Cold War-era Rocky Flats Site in Colorado to build up its capability.
“We will borrow the knowledge of Livermore Labs – and the Rocky Flats contingent is still around – to try to best fit that into what we’re doing,” he said. “Part of that then is shortening the time from the day that the facility is turned over to the time period we produce the first pit.”
Los Alamos and Livermore scientists and engineers will teach Savannah River employees through a new High-Fidelity Training and Operations Center, where they will “mimic” the plutonium pit production process “in a non-radioactive manner using surrogate materials in an unclassified area that allows us to operate with surrogates where we can train folks …through operational readiness while, in parallel, we’re completing the build-out of the pit production facility,” Carr said.
Some site preparation work is already underway before the design of the plutonium facility is in hand, Carr said. SRNS will continue “clicking off projects that are a reasonable risk to the government,” while the overall design is finalized, he said.
“The funding is strong and the commitment is strong,” Carr said.
