The management and operations contractor for the Savannah River Site in South Carolina has hired 900 employees to date in fiscal 2019, part of its efforts to offset workforce attrition and to ramp up current and upcoming missions.
Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS) plans to hire up to 300 more workers before the fiscal year ends on Sept. 30, and roughly 750 employees in each of the next two years.
“We have enduring missions to perform involving nuclear materials management, environmental stewardship and the Savannah River National Laboratory, as examples,” SRNS President and CEO Stuart MacVean said in a recent press release. “Performing these missions safely, securely and efficiently requires we maintain certain levels of staffing throughout our organization.”
An SRNS spokesperson said Tuesday that the large influx of new employees will serve in various jobs at the Department of Energy facility, including mechanical and electric engineering, facility operations, radiation control, site maintenance, and administration.
Binge hiring has been part of SRNS’ years-long approach to offset workforce attrition, as the contractor loses an increasing number of employees to retirement. Though many new jobs are meant to replace those who have retired, the workforce has grown to more than 6,100 – an uptick from the contractor’s 5,438 employees as of September 2018.
The average employee age is 47. That’s a good sign for SRNS, which reported in 2016 that its average workforce age was 54.
Savannah River Nuclear Solutions is also ramping up hiring to take on growing missions and upcoming ventures.
Expanding missions include tritium production for the U.S. Department of Defense. The amount of tritium produced at SRS is not made public for security reasons, since the gas is used to trigger a chain reaction in nuclear weapons. But Savannah River Nuclear Solutions did report in November that it was hiring about 100 more workers this fiscal year to increase tritium production.
SRNS Senior Vice President Carol Barry said more workers will be needed to work at the proposed Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility, which will produce plutonium pits for nuclear warheads. Under the plutonium pit production proposal, SRS would produce 50 pit cores per year by 2030, with the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico producing 30 cores annually.
As of now, SRS is working to convert the former Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) into its plutonium pit facility. The MFFF was supposed to turn weapon-usable plutonium into commercial nuclear fuel. But the project was terminated in October, years after the Energy Department determined it would cost three times more than the $17 billion estimate to complete the mission.
It is unclear how many workers are currently involved in the project, or how many will be hired in the coming years, since the pit mission is in the early stages. The Energy Department’s fiscal 2020 budget proposal calls for $410 million to design the facility. “Though still early in the development of this proposed new mission, we have a need at this time to fill openings in several key areas, such as design engineering and project management,” Barry said in the press release.
Savannah River Nuclear Solutions in December held a job fair for MFFF workers employed by CB&I MOX Services, following project termination. The contractor this week did not say how many former MFFF workers have been hired.
Since October 2014, Savannah River Nuclear Solutions has hired more than 3,000 employees, with the majority replacing retired workers. The contractor is a partnership of Fluor, Honeywell, and Stoller Newport News Nuclear, and is in the middle of a one-year, $1 billion contract extension that will expire on July 31, 2019. That follows the initial, 10-year, $9.5 billion deal that was signed in 2008.
