Savannah River pit facility design 90% complete in 2026, NNSA exec says

James McConnell, acting principal deputy administrator for the National Nuclear Security Administration, said the design for the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility in South Carolina should be 90% complete in calendar year 2026.

Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.), chair of the Senate Armed Services subcommittee on Strategic Forces, asked McConnell how the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) was ensuring the smaller companion plant at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico can meet the demand for production of plutonium pits until Savannah River can do “rate production” of 50 pits per year. 

“By 2028, we will get to the 30 pits per year capability at Los Alamos,” McConnell said while testifying Tuesday in front of the subcommittee. He added that “in parallel at Savannah River” the NNSA is “working to mature the design, to get to 90% design in the calendar year 2026.”

This will allow NNSA to “move on to construction and production of the plant by 2032, to get to initial production and then rate production of at least 50 pits per year at Savannah River in that time frame,” McConnell said.

McConnell did not say how this timeline would be affected by the detailed review of environmental impacts of planned plutonium pit production as part of a federal judge’s ruling last fall. NNSA will hold public hearings and meetings as part of the process as early as next week.

Los Alamos would initially make cores for the first stages of W87-1 warheads, which are to top the Air Force’s planned silo-based Sentinel missiles some time next decade. Savannah River will make cores for the W93 warheads, which would top the nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile and begin production in the mid-2030s, according to Robbins in a recent hearing. 

NNSA produced a “diamond-stamped,” or war-reserve quality, first production unit of a W87-1 plutonium pit in October. NNSA has not said how many pits have been produced since then.

Section 3120 of the fiscal 2019 National Defense Authorization Act put into law that NNSA produce 30 plutonium pits by 2026 at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where plutonium pits were first produced during the Manhattan Project in 1945.