The management and operations contractor for the Savannah River Site in South Carolina said it has enough job openings for more than half of the people who will be laid off as a result of the Department of Energy canceling construction of the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility.
Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS) “does have 900 positions to fill,” a spokesperson for the Fluor-led company wrote in a Thursday email to Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor. “Our intent is to match as many of those as possible with MOX employees. There is considerable overlap between their skills and our needs, so we should be able to find a good number of our needed new hires among the MOX personnel.”
MOX Services has already announced it will lay off nearly 1,000 employees from the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) before Valentine’s Day. That covers more than 600 on Jan. 7 and about 375 by Feb. 4.
The Savannah River project employs more than 1,500 people, and the programs DOE has proposed to replace it at the Savannah River Site must overcome significant political hurdles before they can absorb MFFF refugees.
It was not clear at deadline Friday how many of SRNS’ openings were for full-time positions. It also was not clear which projects any former MFFF employees would work on, should they join Savannah River Nuclear Solutions.
The SRNS spokesperson said any new hires would work on a “variety of projects across SRNS missions, both for [the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management] and [National Nuclear Security Administration].”
The National Nuclear Security Administration spends about $650 million a year at Savannah River. The Environmental Management office’s Cold War weapons cleanup mission dwarfs that figure, at around $1.5 billion for fiscal 2019.
After a protracted political battle dating back to 2014, the National Nuclear Security Administration in October canceled MOX Services’ contract to build MFFF: a facility designed to dispose of 34 metric tons of nuclear weapon-usable plutonium.
The Energy Department has already spent about $5 billion building the MFFF and thought it would have to spend about $17 billion more to finish it by 2048. MOX Services disputed the figure and said it would cost about $10 billion more to finish by 2029.
South Carolina politicians led by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) are skeptical that a post-MFFF Savannah River Site will be as powerful a jobs engine as the project was.
The Department of Energy wants to turn the MFFF into a weapons factory capable of annually producing 50 warhead cores called plutonium pits by 2030. The agency has said the program will be a major, and long-term, employer for the site. Graham and his fellow congressionals are not sure South Carolina will ever get the mission.
At deadline, there was no word on when DOE might start modifying MFFF for pit production, or even whether it can do so before completing a potentially years-long environmental review.
Meanwhile, the political patrons of DOE’s existing pit factory at the Los Alamos National Laboratory — which is being rebuilt with an eye toward resuming production by 2026 and ramping up to 30 pits a year by 2030 — want the whole pit mission for New Mexico.
Congress, for its part, has barely started to debate the idea of making pits at MFFF.
Likewise, while lawmakers have approved $25 million in the current budget year for DOE to study its alternative plutonium disposal method, dilute-and-dispose, they also forbade the agency from using those funds to actually build dilute-and-dispose infrastructure.
Under dilute-and-dispose, DOE would chemically weaken the plutonium intended for the MFFF, mix the material with concrete-like grout called stardust, and dispose of the resulting mixture deep underground in New Mexico at DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. However, New Mexico’s Senate delegation does not like the idea of expanding the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant to accept the diluted plutonium.
The MFFF still has a $220 million budget for 2019. That is expected to be enough to wind down construction some time in early fiscal 2020, which begins Oct. 1 of next year. When it canceled the MFFF in October, DOE said MOX Services would take about a year to close out the plant. MFFF is not part of the SRNS budget.
Elsewhere at Savannah River Site, the National Nuclear Security Aministration’s tritium mission is poised to absorb some jobs, but not immediately.
At Savannah River, the NNSA fills tritium reservoirs to be inserted into nuclear weapons. The radioactive gas, produced in a Tennesee Valley Authority reactor, boosts the yield of thermonuclear weapons. The gas decays quickly, so the agency must periodically produce more. However, the Savannah River tritium facilities are about 60 years old and must be replaced.
So, the National Nuclear Security Administration plans to build a new tritium processing facility soon, beginning with $10 million worth of design work in 2019. All told, the new Tritium Production Capability infrastructure could cost $500 million to $600 million and take until 2029 to complete, according to DOE’s 2019 budget request.
Nearly all the post-MFFF stockpile work at Savannah River Site will be handled by whatever company, or combination of companies, succeeds SRNS as the Savannah River site-management contractor.
The agency expects to solicit the next Savannah River Site management and operations contract in January. According to a draft solicitation released in August, that contract could be worth nearly $15 billion over 10 years. The Energy Department envisioned a five-year base period worth about $7 billion; a three-year option worth about $4.5 billion; and a two-year option worth about $2.5 billion. A separate line item for construction of the new tritium facilities at the site’s H-Area is valued at about $520 million.
SRNS, led by Fluor with partners Huntington Ingalls and Honeywell, is on the job through July 31, 2019.
