Savannah River Pit Set to Gel Design in April in Formal Sign Off by DOE DepSec

10/23/2020

By Dan Leone

The National Nuclear Security Administration should formalize in April its choice to build a pit-production from the remains of the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina an agency official said recently.

That would set the stage for the semiautonomous DOE nuclear weapons agency to approve a formal cost and schedule baseline for the planned Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility (SRPPF) in fiscal year 2022. Construction to mod the old Mixed Oxide facility would begin the same year, Scott Cannon, the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) director of project management at the Savannah River Site, and federal project director for SRPPF, told the South Carolina Governor’s Nuclear Advisory Council Oct. 16.

The short-term stopgap budget that went into effect at the Oct. 1 start of the 2021 federal fiscal year holds the SRPPF budget to about $410 million, compared with more than $442 million as requested — much less of a gap than some programs face under the so-called continuing resolution, but still 7% less than what the agency sought as part of its top-priority pit-infrastructure buildout.

Nevertheless, in last week’s webcast presentation, held after deadline for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor, Cannon told the advisory group that SRPPF remains on track for the deputy secretary of energy to sign off on a critical decision 1 review — the project management milestone where the Department of Energy officially makes the decision to build SRPPF out of the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility official — on or around April 1. The final draft of the critical decision 1 package will be finished around December, Cannon said.

Between now and then, Cannon said, the project will work on a preliminary cost and schedule analysis that will winnow the projects scope down to a range of time and dollars by critical decision 1. In parallel, the NNSA’s Office of Cost Estimating and Program Evaluation will produce a cost estimate independently from the SRPPF project. The independent review should be finished around January, Cannon said.

The SRPPF design team includes Fluor’s operations in Greenville, S.C., for construction, plus a “LANL/Merrick relationship that’s doing our gloveboxes,” Sandia National Laboratory to design physical security infrastructure, and the Fluor-led Savannah River Nuclear Solutions to handle nuclear safety and integration, Cannon said.