The Department of Energy hosted a three-day meeting in South Carolina last week to talk about plutonium pit production at the Savannah River Site, the agency’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) said.
The NNSA Office of Defense Programs led a what an agency spokesperson called “a plutonium pit production workshop” from Oct 2-4.“Workshop attendees included senior managers and staff from across the Nuclear Security Enterprise,” the spokesperson said.
In the Nuclear Posture Review released in February, the White House directed the NNSA to each year produce 80 plutonium cores for warheads by 2030 for future nuclear-weapons refurbishment programs. The agency wants to make 50 annually at what is now the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) being built at Savannah River, and 30 a year at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
To make pits in Savannah River, the NNSA plans to convert the MFFF from its current design as a plutonium-disposal plant. South Carolina and the state’s congressional delegation have resisted that plan, and the state in May sued the NNSA in federal court to stop it. The agency has appealed an injunction levied in June by a U.S. District Court judge in South Carolina, but a federal appeals court had not ruled on the matter at deadline Monday for Weapons Complex Morning Briefing.
Congress had resisted the plan to convert the MFFF for pit duty, though lawmakers in bills passed this year and last permitted DOE to opt out of its obligation to build the plant for plutonium disposal, which the agency subsequently did.
In a minibus appropriations bill signed into law in September, Congress provided some $220 million for MFFF construction in fiscal 2019. The NNSA could start winding down construction if the District Court’s injunction falls on appeal. Meanwhile, the bill provided about $220 million to start working on pit infrastructure at Los Alamos: about 6.5 percent less than the White House’s request.