It will cost up to $4.6 billion to convert an unfinished plutonium-disposal plant in South Carolina into a working factory for nuclear-warhead cores by 2030, a spokesperson for the National Nuclear Security Administration said Friday.
The semiautonomous Department of Energy agency delivered the preliminary cost estimate a day after it announced it wanted to turn the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) being built at the Savannah River Site into a factory capable of producing 50 fissile warhead cores called plutonium pits a year.
The Energy Department did not say how long it thought it would take to convert the MFFF for weapons duty. The agency on Thursday announced it would split pit production between the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the converted MOX plant. Los Alamos previously had the mission to itself. Congress must authorize and fund the new two-pronged approach.
The estimate the DOE spokesperson delivered by email Friday is not the agency’s official cost projection for converting the MFFF. The official figure will only arrive after the design for the converted facility is 90 percent complete: a milestone in DOE project management parlance known as CD-2. Design work would not begin until some time after the deputy secretary of energy officially selects DOE’s preferred alternative for producing 80 plutonium pits a year by 2030, the DOE spokesperson said Friday.
Under the new DOE approach, the converted MFFF would make 50 pits a year, while planned Los Alamos facilities would churn out at least 30 pits annually.
The new pits will be placed into existing weapons as part of the $1 trillion, 30-year U.S. program to extend the service life of its nuclear arsenal.
The DOE estimate for converting the MFFF into a pit plant is nearly equal to what MFFF prime CB&I AREVA MOX Services says it would cost through 2029 to finish building the plant for its original purpose: turning 34 metric tons of plutonium into commercial reactor fuel under an arms-control pact with Russia. The Energy Department says that would cost significantly more and take significantly longer; the agency instead wants to dilute the plutonium and bury it deep underground in New Mexico.
