House Armed Services chair Adam Smith (D-Wash.) again railed against the National Nuclear Security Administration’s plan to turn Savannah River into a plutonium pit factory, saying the “idiotic” and “dangerous,” plan might leave the U.S. without the means to modernize its nuclear weapons on time and on budget.
“I am highly skeptical of the level of competence in the NNSA [National Nuclear Security Administration],” Smith said in a virtual chat hosted Dec. 11 by the D.C.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank.
Smith said the semi autonomous Department of Energy weapons agency’s plan to turn the Savannah River Site’s partially completed Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility — a cancelled plutonium recycling plant design to turn weapons material into power-plant fuel — into a pit factory was a piece of parochial politics that added unnecessary expenses to the NNSA arm of the 30-year nuclear modernization plan to update the U.S. arsenal.
“It used to be a bowling alley, but now it’s going to be restaurant!” Smith said. “It’s idiot, and also dangerous because we need the pits. We need to be able to effectively do things, so I am deeply concerned about the NNSA.”
Smith also allowed that the NNSA was perhaps not entirely at fault, and that Congress “did not play the most productive role in this.”
The NNSA plans to make pits at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Savannah River Site. Los Alamos is scheduled to come online in 2024 and make 30 pits annually by 2026. Savannah River, with the converted Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, is supposed to contribute another 50 pits annually by 2030, for a total of at least 80 a year after the turn of the next decade.
