Gen. John Hyten, commander of U.S. Strategic Command and effectively customer-in-chief for the nuclear weapons maintained by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), toured the Savannah River Site in South Carolina this week.
Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor sister publication Weapons Complex Morning Briefing was first to confirm Hyten’s visit this week.
Hyten on Thursday toured the site’s tritium facilities, which process a crucial hydrogen isotope that magnifies the explosive power of thermonuclear weapons, and the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF): an unfinished plutonium disposal plant the NNSA wants to turn into a factory for producing fissile nuclear-warhead cores called plutonium pits.
Both pits and tritium are needed for current and future nuclear-weapon modernization programs. Hyten, as head of STRATCOM, commands all U.S. nuclear forces, irrespective of service branch.
It was unclear whether Hyten had any private meetings with Department of Energy officials during his visit. A STRATCOM spokesperson deferred to DOE for comment. The local Aiken Standard reported Hyten was scheduled to meet with Stuart MacVean, president and CEO of site management contractor Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, and Savannah River National Laboratory Director Vahid Majidi.
After his visit, in a prepared statement issued by DOE, Hyten said the Savannah River Site was “well-suited to contribute to our strategic deterrence mission.”
Hyten visited Savannah River Site at a time when the NNSA projects it may not be able to produce at least 80 plutonium pits a year by 2030, as the Donald Trump administration requested in February in its Nuclear Posture Review. Also at the time of the tour this week, the agency’s efforts to turn the MFFF into a pit factory had temporarily ground to a halt.
A federal judge in June blocked the NNSA from suspending MFFF construction at least until later this year, if not longer. Congress also is mulling legislation that would prohibit the agency from closing the plant until at least fiscal 2020, which begins on Oct. 1, 2019.
Meanwhile, in the wake of the court injunction that put the brakes on the agency’s plan to produce pits in South Carolina, NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty floated the possibility of radically restructuring the weapons mission at the site. Among other things, Gordon-Hagerty said the NNSA would look at moving tritium processing to another site, possibly the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
