House Armed Services chairman casts serious doubt on pit production at SRS

• By Colin Demarest cdemarest@aikenstandard.com
• July 1, 2020

The chairman of the U.S. House Armed Services Committee is, apparently, a gambling man.

During the committee's Wednesday review of annual defense legislation, the National Defense Authorization Act, Rep. Adam Smith said he would "confidently bet $100" that the Savannah River Site would not uphold its end of the inchoate cross-country plutonium pit production mission.

"This isn't like, I don't know, remodeling a bowling alley into a restaurant," the Washington Democrat said of the mothballed Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, a single doubting remark in a longer string of skepticism. "You got to move a lot of very thick concrete walls around, and you got to make sure it works. Seeing what they did at Los Alamos, it’s very difficult to make these things."

Assurances made to Smith at the Savannah River Site – the nuclear-weapons-and-waste hub south of Aiken and New Ellenton – seemingly weren't effective. Smith on Wednesday said he was "worried that we are going to spend billions of dollars, just like we did on the MOX facility, to get nothing."

And that, he continued, "would not be good."

Federal law mandates the production of 80 plutonium pits – the cores at the heart of modern nuclear weapons – per year by 2030. The U.S., though, has for years lacked the ability to produce pits en masse.

To resolve the problem, and to satisfy military demand, the National Nuclear Security Administration and the U.S. Department of Defense in May 2018 recommended making the cores in two states, at two sites. Fifty per year would be made at the Savannah River Site, at a reworked MOX, they counseled. The remaining 30 per year would be made at Los Alamos National Laboratory, a storied plutonium center of excellence near Albuquerque and Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Either site could alone boost production to satisfy the 80-pit demand if needed, according to two separate-but-related environmental studies. A single-site pit production approach, though, would be "perilous," according to U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson, the Republican representing South Carolina's 2nd Congressional District.

The National Nuclear Security Administration, a semiautonomous U.S. Department of Energy agency, axed the MOX project at the Savannah River Site in late 2018. The incomplete nuclear fuel plant was more than a decade in the making and had consumed billions of dollars, as Smith mentioned.

Repurposing the unfinished MOX facility is no "easy thing to do," the committee chairman cautioned. And construction of the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility, as it's been coined, is likely to be "extremely expensive," Rep. Jim Cooper, a Tennessee Democrat, warned at the same meeting.

Beyond that, "most people think it's unlikely to be completed on time," Cooper said.

An independent review of the federal government's pit production strategy in 2019 found that reaching 80 pits per year is possible, but "extremely challenging;" no available option will likely satisfy the demand by deadline; and further risk assessment is needed.

"Members of this committee know full well problems that we've had in the past with premature and, sometimes, inadequate construction plans," Cooper said, arguing for additional oversight. "We want to make sure that there are not unnecessary delays or cost overruns at Savannah River."

A Congressional Budget Office study released early last year very roughly estimated pit production to cost $9 billion over the next decade.

National Nuclear Security Administration and Savannah River Nuclear Solutions officials have acknowledged the tight deadline they are facing. The same officials, though, have expressed confidence in hitting the mark and executing what's been asked of them.

NNSA chief Lisa Gordon-Hagerty has described pit production as "one of our highest national security priorities."