The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration has authorized full construction of the pit production facility’s main processing building at the Savannah River Site, the agency said Oct. 16.
DOE approved the performance baseline for the Savannah River Pit Production Facility’s Main Processing Building on Oct. 15, the department said in a news release. The approval, known as Critical Decision 2/3, establishes the project’s scope, cost and schedule baselines and authorizes construction to proceed.
The facility, which encompasses the primary production building and auxiliary support infrastructure across 160 acres of the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, is intended to manufacture plutonium pits for the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile.
Once operational, Savannah River will join Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico as the second site in NNSA’s strategy to restore domestic pit production capacity. The agency’s broader goal is to establish the capability to produce at least 80 pits annually, with 50 at Savannah River and 30 at Los Alamos.
The latest approval follows DOE’s earlier authorization for the Savannah River facility’s High-Fidelity Training and Operations Center, a separate facility designed to train workers for plutonium pit production.
In a February report, the Government Accountability Office found that cost overruns across NNSA’s portfolio of major construction projects had grown to $4.8 billion, while cumulative schedule delays reached 30 years as of June 2025. Those figures cover multiple projects and do not represent overruns specific to the Savannah River facility.
NNSA’s Oct. 16 announcement did not disclose the approved cost and completion-date figures for the main processing building. The new baseline will provide a benchmark for tracking the project’s cost and schedule as construction advances.
