The National Nuclear Security Administration’s new Plutonium Processing Facility at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina will not be up and running until 2032 at the earliest, according to the contractor who manages the site.
Stuart MacVean, president and CEO of Fluor-led Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, said Wednesday that the new Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility would come online and begin producing plutonium pits between 2032 and 2035. NNSA leadership, including Administrator Jill Hruby, have said the goal of producing 80 plutonium pits a year — at least 50 at Savannah River and another 30 at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico — is “as close to 2030 as possible.”
“I will tell you today, the range is 2032 to 2035,” MacVean told the South Carolina Nuclear Advisory Council meeting Wednesday. “There is a lot of concern going on in the nation today when you look at supply chain, inflation, wage growth and employment capability. There’s a lot of concern that that is going to push it to a higher number that will take longer?”
To speed things along, SRNS has split the project into six sub-efforts, some of which are running concurrently. They are utilities and site preparation, a sand filter and fanhouse subproject, construction of an administration building, the main processing buildings, safeguards and security and a high-fidelity training and operations center, MacVean said.
“The way we broke up those subprojects lets us move a lot of work forward to the left of the actual design review sign-off that you would not have seen in the past,” MacVean said. “Right now we’ve probably got more budget support than we can probably stand.”
There are currently about 1,250 people working at the site with a $1.2 billion fiscal 23 budget. MacVean’s presentation to the advisory panel showed a wide ranging design completion of between 40 and 90 percent.
“We will get very close to that 2030 target, right now,” MacVean said. “But what is important is after that, there is a qualification period.”
That period could last between three and six years before plutonium puts coming out of Savannah River are ready to enter the weapons program, MacVean said. Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California will work together with Savannah River to certify the pits it makes. The process has traditionally taken between six and seven years, but MacVean said the certification process could be reduced to three years by various means.
“We will run it in parallel with the plant’s final construction,” he said.
