AIKEN — Last year, the U.S. Department of Energy began the process of transferring the primary oversight of the Savannah River Site from the Office of Environmental Management to the National Nuclear Security Administration.

Dr. Jeff Griffin, president and CEO of Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, discussed the impact of that change during a presentation to the Rotary Club of Aiken at Newberry Hall on Sept. 29.

“We’ve come to realize … that we’ve actually got to take a little bit more rigid approach,” he said. “We’ve got to step up more. I think primarily as a cleanup site, we’ve done an outstanding job. But now we’ll be responsible for delivering [materials used in nuclear weapons] to our national defense on an even larger basis … and that requires additional commitment and work from us.”

For many years, SRS has had the nation’s only facility for extracting, recycling, purifying and reloading tritium.

“We now are being asked to take on a new activity, [plutonium] pit production,” Griffin said.

A pit is a hollow sphere of plutonium that, when uniformly compressed by explosives inside a warhead or bomb, causes a nuclear explosion, according to the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s website.

According to the federal government’s plan, SRS will be responsible for producing at least 50 pits per year and Los Alamos, which is in New Mexico, will be responsible for producing at least 30 per year.

At SRS, the MOX (mixed oxide) fuel plant, which was constructed for a project that was scrapped, is being repurposed and will be become the pit production facility.

“This is a massive job,” said Griffin, who added that the cost would be “something on the order of $20 billion-plus dollars.”

Meanwhile, “we have a parallel effort going on,” he continued. “This involves developing the capabilities, the machining capabilities [to produce pits]. It [also] involves the development of what we call the High Fidelity Training and Operations Center. It will be a classified facility where we can actually teach staff how to make these [pits]. They can learn [how] to use the equipment and the glove boxes … that will eventually be present in the [pit production] facility itself.”

The pit production facility is scheduled to be “ready for operations by the early 2030s,” according to Griffin.

SRNS is the managing and operating contractor at SRS. The company has roughly 7,000 employees and a $2.7-billion budget.

The NNSA mission “is about 70% of our budget right now, and EM (environmental management) is about 30%,” Griffin said. “If you go back a decade, it would have been the other way around.”

There are other contractors at SRS, but SRNS is the largest.

The total number of workers at SRS, including federal employees, is around 13,000,” Griffin said.