Glovebox design nearly done for SRS pit plant; facility should open in 2032, official says

October 27, 2023
By Dan Parsons

Design of a glovebox facility for the planned Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility in South Carolina is 90% complete and should be done by next spring, an official with the site landlord contractor said this week.

“Glovebox design is going to be at 90 percent around spring of next year, and that’s just all of the glovebox infrastructure that will go into the main process building,” J.C. Wallace, executive vice president and National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) chief operations officer for Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, said Thursday at a meeting of the South Carolina Governor’s Nuclear Advisory Council.

Wallace said the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility itself, called SRPFF, should be complete in 2032.

Savannah River should produce its first plutonium pit, a nuclear weapon’s fissile first-stage core, three years after the plant comes online, Wallace said. It will eventually manufacture at least 50 pits per year to meet the military’s requirements for rehabbing the U.S. nuclear stockpile.

Most of the 80 plutonium pits the military requires per year after 2030 – at least 50 – will be made at Savannah River. The other 30 will be made at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. NNSA Administrator Jill Hruby this year said SRPPF will start operations behind the eight ball and need to make more than 50 pits in its first year.

Gloveboxes fabricated in the U.S. are needed to protect NNSA engineers as they handle and shape plutonium into the specialized shapes used as the primary detonation stage of nuclear weapons. There are only nine companies that supply such high-grade equipment and the push to build 80 pits per year is stressing the supply chain.

“I can tell you that the administrator wants this facility delivered with a critical decision date in 2032 and she would like a first production unit three years after that,” Wallace said. “So that is her go-to. As a contractor, that’s what we’re going to try to deliver but we’re putting an integrated master schedule together in order to demonstrate that that’s something that we’re able to deliver.”

The NNSA’s fiscal 2024 budget says the “scope, cost and schedule estimates approved for SRPPF are between $6.9 billion and $11.1 billion and a CD-4 decision, meaning operational capability of between early 2032 to the end of 2035. Wallace’s estimates push to the later end of that timeline.

NNSA officials, including Administrator Jill Hruby acknowledge they won’t make that deadline and now often say “as close to 2030 as possible.”