Failed mission to one of enduring production, work to transform SRS facility is underway

• By Elizabeth Hustad ehustad@postandcourier.com
• November 12, 2023

More than a decade’s laboring toward fuel fabrication at Savannah River Site ended in failure five years ago and left behind an unfinished structure that now is undergoing huge modifications that will allow it to serve a new mission: manufacturing the cores to nuclear warheads.

Dismantling the former Mixed Oxide facility at SRS began in January with the objective of producing the first plutonium pit in 2035.

Maintaining a nuclear deterrent — an arsenal of nuclear warheads — requires restoration of the country’s capability for producing these critical components of the warheads, something the U.S. hasn’t been able to do in nearly 35 years after production was shut down at Rocky Flats near Denver.

When production begins, Savannah River Site and New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Laboratory will be responsible for supplying a combined 80 of these nuclear cores per year.

Running tandem to the work of dismantling the MOX facility is the design of the modified structure that will grow from it. This design work is now about 50% complete, Dennis Carr told the North Augusta Chamber of Commerce at a breakfast meeting Nov. 9.

arr is president and CEO for Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, a contractor that provides services to both the National Nuclear Security Administration and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management.

Construction should begin by spring or early summer of 2025.

That work will require extensive modifications to the old MOX facility – think, cutting through 2 feet to 6 six feet of concrete walls. “It is going to be a formidable task,” Carr said.

SRNS’ current budget, which governs all of its missions, not just the preparations for pit production, is $2.7 billion.

That’s “a pretty significant increase” of nearly $1 billion in just the past couple of years, Carr said.

Carr said that Savannah River Site’s evolving missions – from refining nuclear material in the 1950s to now cleaning up what’s left from those original operations and, come 2035, to one of plutonium pit production – have helped secure that additional funding.

“It’s a reflection of the new missions, but it’s a reflection of the success of the workforce,” he said.

It’s projected that the contracts issued just to repurpose the facility will draw some 3,500 workers to Savannah River Site and its neighboring localities.

“North Augusta is going to be impacted; there’s no question about it, given the magnitude of this project,” Carr said.

Another 1,800 people will remain permanently once pit production begins at SRS — but they’ll arrive with the start of construction: the goal, said Carr, is that this workforce will be trained concurrent with construction so that the complex process of pit production can begin upon completion.

Production requires Savannah River Site to first receive from the NNSA plutonium reserves, then remove any impurities that have accumulated in the plutonium via radioactive decay. The purified material is then cast and assembled into the final product: the marble-shaped pit of a nuclear warhead.

“It is more of an art than a science to make a [plutonium] pit. We’ve never made a pit at this site — we’re learning from [Los Alamos] where they’re deeper into the process,” he said. “We’re trying to learn from them, and once we’ve learned, to bring that back here.”

Still relevant: The legacy of 1953

U.S. Department of Energy has long been landlord of Savannah River Site. But with pit production on the horizon, SRS is now transitioning to missions given it by its other client, the National Nuclear Security Administration.

Carr said it’s a reflection of “moving from a closure-type mission to one of an enduring production mission that’s going to go many years into the future.”

The five operating reactors (plus one test reactor) at SRS are now “shut down, defueled or are in different states of final remediation,” he said. And much of the site, up to 87% of its 310 square miles, was cleared during the 2009-2011 period of accelerated clean-up operations there.

The goal is to transfer out as much of the material as possible — even as more material continues to come in.

“There still are operating reactors, there’s still non-proliferation threats out there that we have to deal with,” he said.

SRS takes in both domestic and foreign nuclear material and down-blends it into a non-weapons grade form. The material is then packaged and shipped to a plant in New Mexico, where it’s locked into a salt formation some 2,000 feet below ground.