Parts of Savannah River Pit Plant Could Be Under Construction By Year’s End, Site Prime Says

• By: Dan Leone
• October 4, 2022

Subcontractors could begin building a planned plutonium pit factory at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., by Dec. 31, the site’s prime contractor said Monday in a press release.

“Construction is expected to begin before the end of this year,” the Fluor [FLR]-led Savannah River Nuclear Solutions wrote in the release. “Approximately 2,500 skilled craft and trade union workers will be hired for all phases of this massive construction project.”

Officially, the NNSA remained years away on Monday from approving a final design, or approving the start of construction, on the planned pit plant. In its fiscal year 2023 budget request, released in May, the NNSA said it expected to finalize SRPPF’s final design by September 2023 and authorize the start of construction by December 2023. 

The agency does not expect to produce pits at the facility until the early- or mid-2030s.

Savannah River Nuclear Solutions put out its presser to call attention to the planned signing on Thursday of a project labor agreement that will set the terms for hiring construction workers to build the planned Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility (SRPPF): the larger of the two pit factories that the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) plans to operate by the mid-2030s.

NNSA wants SRPPF to produce at least 50 pits, nuclear-weapon first-stage cores, a year. The agency last year said the facility would not be able to do that until some time between 2032 and 2035. The NNSA since 2018 or so had said it wanted to start up SRPPF by 2030. The NNSA is also building a pit plant at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. That facility is supposed to produce at least 30 pits a year by 2026.

Currently, SRPPF is funded through Dec. 16 at a level that is lower than what the NNSA said the plant needed in fiscal year 2023, and at a much lower than what Congress proposed this year in most of the fiscal 2023 defense spending bills it produced. That is thanks to a stopgap budget signed into law Friday and which held SRPPF, NNSA and federal agencies broadly to their 2022 spending levels. 

NNSA officials testified this spring before budget writing committees in Congress that SRPPF could not be built any faster if Congress threw more money than the requested $758 million at the plant for fiscal year 2023. 

The House Appropriations Committee heeded the request, but the Senate Appropriations Committee came in at $500 more than that for SRPPF. The House and Senate version of the annual National Defense Authorization Act likewise had hundreds of millions more than requested for SRPPF.

The NNSA plans to build SRPPF plant from the partially completed Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, which was originally conceived as a way to dispose of surplus U.S. weapon-usable plutonium.