The National Nuclear Security Administration is “targeting” fiscal year 2026 as the startup date for a new facility at the Savannah River Site that will process 34 metric tons of surplus weapon usable plutonium for disposal in New Mexico, an agency official told advisors to South Carolina’s governor this week.
That’s two years earlier than the 2028 date the agency usually tosses out in public meetings, and which at deadline remained as the only startup date for the Surplus Plutonium Disposition (SPD) project on National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) Strategic Integrated Roadmap.
The 2026 target date came from a slide that Jason Armstrong, manager for the NNSA’s Savannah River Field Office, briefed to the South Carolina Governor’s Nuclear Advisory Council during a meeting webcast from the statehouse complex in Columbia on Monday.
The date also appeared, a single time, as part of a “schedule complete range,” on page 662 of the NNSA’s 2022 budget request, released in May. The agency has yet to baseline the SPD project at Savannah River — that should happen by the summer of 2022, according to Armstrong’s slides — so the facility’s cost and schedule are not official yet.
The project hit its critical decision 1 milestone in 2020, after which the NNSA estimated it would cost about $620 million to build three new glove boxes and a waste-staging-and-characterization pad at Savannah River Site’s K-Area.
The NNSA already stages plutonium waste at the pad and critical characterization equipment there is supposed to be operational by March, clearing the way for shipments of a non-NNSA tranche of plutonium waste to DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico in the summer of 2022.
SPD will replace the cancelled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility as the NNSA’s means of getting rid of 34 metric tons of surplus weapon-usable plutonium covered by a now-abandoned materials reduction pact with Russia. Under SPD, the agency will blend plutonium oxides, supplied by the Los Alamos National Laboratory from surplus plutonium metal, with an inert mixture that will be buried deep underground at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
Savannah River Site’s K-Area already has one glovebox performing this so-called dilute-and-dispose work, though it currently is working its way through a tranche of plutonium owned by DOE’s Office of Environmental Management.
