The prime contractor at the Savannah River Site last week signed a project labor agreement with a consortium of 19 labor unions for construction of the larger of the National Nuclear Security Administration plutonium pit plants.
The Fluor-led Savannah River Nuclear Solutions and the Augusta Building and Construction Trades Council inked the accord in Augusta, Ga., according to a press release from the prime. A project labor agreement is an umbrella document that sets general terms for many of the construction workers who will help build the plant.
A spokesperson for Savannah River Nuclear Solutions said last week that some construction of SRPPF could begin by the end of December.
In May, as part of its budget request for the 2023 fiscal year that began Oct. 1, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) said it expected to finalize the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility’s (SRPPF) final design by September 2023 and authorize the start of construction by December 2023.
The agency does not expect to produce pits at Savannah River until the early- or mid-2030s. That’s a few years later than the best-case scenario the NNSA imagined around 2018, when it formally made the call to build SRPPF from the partially constructed Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility.
The NNSA is building two pit plants to produce fissile cores for nuclear-weapon first stages for most of the rest of this century: SRPPF, and a smaller pit plant at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The Los Alamos plant is supposed to produce multiple war-ready pits by 2024, though the lab acknowledged it faced delays, and 30 pits annually by 2026.
Meanwhile, Congress dealt the NNSA’s pit budget a short hand for most of the first quarter of fiscal year 2023, holding the enterprise-wide construction budget for the pit plants at the annualized equivalent of $1.7 billion instead of the $2.4 billion the Joe Biden administration requested for fiscal 2023.
That is the level of funding allowed by the stopgap budget, or continuing resolution, that Congress passed to keep the government running through Dec. 16 after the legislature failed to produce a budget for all of 2023 before the new fiscal year began.
