The South Carolina Governor’s Nuclear Advisory Council meets Thursday to discuss, among many things, the transition of the Savannah River Site from the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management to the National Nuclear Security Administration.
Leading off the presentations is a landlord transition update from Savannah River Nuclear Solutions Executive Vice President and NNSA Chief Operations Officer J.C. Wallace. He will provide context for the site’s move from primarily cleanup to construction of the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility (SRPPF), which is being built to make at least 50 nuclear weapon cores annually sometime in the 2030s.
The meeting will begin at 1 p.m. Eastern Time at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, S.C. but will not be livestreamed. A recording of the proceedings will be available here for the public on Friday.
Other presentations at the meeting will be provided by Duke Energy, Savannah River Mission Completion, the site’s liquid waste contractor for the Office of Environmental Management, Dominion Energy and Southern Co. There will also be a public comment period.
Producing plutonium pits is driving the shift in management of the Savannah River Site in South Carolina to the National Nuclear Security Administration. The transition should be complete in October 2024.
Though the Savannah River Site has never made plutonium pits, it will shoulder the largest burden of production when the NNSA eventually begins building 80 per year sometime after 2030.
NNSA officials, including Administrator Jill Hruby acknowledge they won’t make that deadline and now often say “as close to 2030 as possible.” The other 30 pits the U.S. military requires to carry out its nuclear deterrence mission will be made at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
Design of the SRPPF is half-finished and the facility could be built by 2032. Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, the site operations contractor overseeing design of the pit facility for the NNSA, is repurposing the existing 430,000-square-foot building that was once the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication facility there.
