A key project at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site that supplies tritium for nuclear weapons is up and running for the first time since 2015.
The Tritium Extraction Facility (TEF) removes the material from tritium-producing burnable absorber rods (TPBARs) that have been irradiated in commercial light-water reactors by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). The tritium work at SRS is conducted by Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS), the site’s management and operations contractor.
The facility as of March had restarted operations following a readiness assessment and minor corrective actions, according to a March 24 report from the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB).
The assessment, conducted by DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), was necessary because, in June 2015, three module stripper blowers required repair after the motors in two had reached the end of their useful life, and the third was nearing its end. The module stripper system is used to maintain an atmosphere in modules where tritium extraction work is conducted on TPBARs.
Extraction is usually conducted annually at SRS, but the repairs required the site to skip a year, said Angie French, the SRNS communications lead on NNSA operations. Once repairs and the post-maintenance testing were successfully completed, the module stripper system was returned to service prior to the start of the readiness assessment in February.
The readiness assessment needed to resume TEF operations took about two weeks between February and March, and resulted in only one pre-start finding. That finding related to the means by which SRNS verifies the age of replacement parts for the facility.
SRS provides tritium gas for the nation’s defense program. Tritium trigger the chain reaction in a nuclear weapon.
Funding for operating the facility comes from the SRS weapons activities dollars. The site’s weapons budget line is usually $230 million a year, French said.
