ALEXANDRIA, VA. —The Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility team has staffed up to about 400 people and, despite near-term competition for specialized skill sets from other nuclear-weapon sites, should easily be able to flex up to its full complement of 1,800 when it comes time to cast pits next decade, the site contractor’s head of infrastructure said here Tuesday.
That headcount so far includes some people who have unretired for the third or fourth time, David Olson, executive vice president for National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) capital projects, told a mostly industry audience here during the Exchange Monitor’s annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit.
Long term, “the demand signal can be met,” said Olson, citing data from a resource-management software platform provided to the company by Pro2Serve, Oak Ridge, Tenn., and KeySource, Hudson, Ohio. “In the near-term, are we competing for similar resources with Los Alamos, Livermore and Savannah River? Yes, but the market’s been able to accommodate both of our needs.”
On the NNSA’s current timeline, the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility (SRPPF) will start producing 50 pits annually between 2032 and 2035. The agency acknowledged this spring that it could not meet a statutory deadline to be ready to start production in 2030. Olson said the site operations contractor was directed by the government to “compress” SRPPF’s schedule “to get as close to 2030, is the charge from the government.”
SRPPF is being built from what Olson called the “concrete shell” of the partially completed Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at Savannah River, a plutonium recycling plant that DOE cancelled in 2018. Fluor is converting the building for pit duty, Merrick & Co., Los Alamos, is providing glove boxes for the pit program and Sandia National Laboratories is handling physical security.
The delay in converting the facility into a pit factory is “driven by the reality of all the construction that has to be done in that building,” Olson said.
Along with the pit mission at Savannah River, which has not been a weapons production site in decades, comes a new waste stream to manage.
NNSA expects that the smaller of its two planned plutonium pit factories, the one at Los Alamos National Laboratory’s PF-4 Plutonium Facility, will generate some 2,000 canisters of transuranic waste annually once it begins producing 30 pits a year, a milestone scheduled for 2026. That’s according to a slide briefed here by Richard Baca, the deputy chief of staff for the NNSA’s office of safety, infrastructure and operations who shared the podium with Olson.
DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico is the only deep-underground permanent disposal facility for transuranic waste in the country. Asked by an audience member what the SRPPF would do with its waste streams if the the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant became suddenly unavailable, Baca said, “let me get back to you.”
