ARLINGTON, Va. — The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) will hone its acquisition approach for the plutonium-pit plant to be built at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina around September 2020, a long-time agency contractor said here Wednesday.
Fluor-led Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, the Savannah River site management contractor, is on the hook to turn in a Critical Decision (CD) 1 to the NNSA by the end of the government’s 2020 fiscal year, Gregory Meyer, Fluor’s senior vice president for operations in the environmental and nuclear group, said during a question-and-answer session here at the ExchangeMonitor’s annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit.
CD-1 is the project management milestone at which the Department of Energy sets its acquisition approach for a project and completes a detailed analysis of alternatives that justifies the agency’s strategy for meeting a certain mission need. It also establishes a preliminary cost estimate for a project, but that typically is not revealed to the public; official cost estimates follow at CD-2.
After a protracted legal and political battle, the NNSA in October canceled MOX Services’ prime contract to build the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) and began plans to convert the unfinished plutonium-disposal plant into a factory capable of annually producing 50 warhead cores called plutonium pits by 2030.
Should the NNSA actually turn the MFFF into a pit plant, the work would become a choice plum for industry, and one of the only agency missions up for grabs at Savannah River in the foreseeable future. The other is the agency’s tritium mission, which would be a part of an estimated 10-year, $15-billion Savannah River site-management contract the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management still has not put on the street for bids. Savannah River Nuclear Solutions is on the job through July.
Meyer, for his part, thinks the NNSA’s planned pit mission at Savannah River is “achievable.”
But on Tuesday at the summit, former NNSA Deputy Administrator for Defense Programs Everett Beckner called 50 pits a year by 2030 “a high hurdle” to clear.
The Donald Trump administration’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review called on the NNSA to make at least 80 pits a year by 2030. The agency subsequently said it would split the work between the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the converted MFFF.
