A key project at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site that supplies tritium for nuclear weapons is up and running for the first time since 2015.
The Tritium Extraction Facility (TEF) removes the material from tritium-producing burnable absorber rods (TPBARs) that have been irradiated in commercial light-water reactors by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). The tritium work is conducted by Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS), the South Carolina site’s management and operations contractor.
The facility as of March had restarted operations following a readiness assessment and minor corrective actions, according to a March 24 report from the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB).
The assessment, conducted by DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), was necessary because in June 2015, three module stripper blowers required repair after the motors in two had reached the end of their useful life, and the third was nearing its end. The module stripper system is used to maintain an atmosphere in modules where tritium extraction work is conducted on TPBARs.
Extraction is usually conducted annually at SRS, but the repairs required the site to skip a year, said Angie French, the SRNS communications lead on NNSA operations. Once repairs and the post-maintenance testing were successfully completed in November, the module stripper system was returned to service prior to the start of the readiness assessment in February.
The readiness assessment took about two weeks between February and March, and resulted in only one prestart finding, related to the means by which SRNS verifies the age of replacement parts for the facility.
The Savannah River Site provides tritium gas that triggers the chain reaction in U.S. nuclear weapons. French said she could not disclose how much tritium the site extracts each year.
The facility’s operating funds come from the SRS weapons activities dollars. The site’s weapons budget line is usually $230 million a year, French said.
