The Savannah River Site in February completed upgrades to tritium processing facilities at the site’s H-Area that will allow personnel to fill tritium reservoirs for the planned B61-12 nuclear gravity bomb life-extension program, the site said Tuesday.
The upgrades doubled the capacity of one of the site’s tritium lines capacity, according to a press release, and involved “removing dozens of valves, reducing gas flow restrictions and the time required to remove extraneous gas during the loading process.”
The planned B61-12 gravity bomb will homogenize four versions of the oldest deployed U.S. nuclear weapon. Savannah River will help fill up the tritium reservoir for the weapon’s 3X Assembly, part of B61-12’s new gas transfer system. Tritium, a radioactive hydrogen isotope, increases the efficiency of thermonuclear weapons, increasing their destructive power.
The NNSA plans to replace the tritium facilities at Savannah River Site’s H-Area Old Manufacturing Facility with a new Tritium Finishing Facility that is supposed to be operational around 2030, site officials have said.
Including Air Force and NNSA work, the B61-12 will cost between roughly $11.5 billion and $13 billion over about 20 years, according to documents from the Energy and Defense departments. The NNSA’s share of the bomb’s cost is about $8 billion, the agency estimates. The F-35A and the planned B-21 Raider will eventually carry B61-12.
After delays related to capacitors used by multiple components of the B61-12, the NNSA expects to complete B61-12 first production unit in November 2021.
Editor’s note 05/26/2021, 10:07 a.m. Eastern time. The story was changed to show that a new tritium facility is supposed to be operational at the Savannah River Site around 2030.
