Two Department of Energy contractors, one in in charge of operations and the other responsible for liquid waste and cleanup, touted recent developments at the Savannah River Site Thursday a meeting of the South Carolina Governor’s Nuclear Advisory Council (GNAC),

A $1.4 billion training facility to support the Savannah River Plutonium Production Facility (SRPPF) is coming along and could be complete in 2028, said Jeff Griffin, president & CEO of Fluor-led Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS. 

The High-Fidelity Training and Operations Center (HFTOC), will have similar access classifications and features as the SRPPF plutonium pit production facility, Griffin said. Although the HFTOC will be a non-nuclear building, it will speed up training for workers who will staff the SRPPF.

SRNS manages the 310-square-mile Savannah River Site .The training facility will have gloveboxes, which are sealed enclosures that allow workers to safely handle hazardous materials. It will also have the necessary tools for training, when workers from Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) are brought in from New Mexico for pit production training.

“Also, if we want to change operations, we can do it in this facility first,” Griffin said. “We can refine and test equipment since this facility is nonnuclear and nonradioactive, but still classified,” Griffin said. 

 All told, DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is expected to annually produce 80 or more pits, the fissile cores of a nuclear weapon, to replenish the nation’s nuclear stockpile. The SRPPF in South Carolina will eventually work in tandem with Los Alamos to meet the demand, with Savannah River expected to make upwards of 50 pits per year once SRPPF construction is complete.

SRPPF was initially expected to begin operations by 2030, but more recent DOE projections have said it could be 2034.

For his part, Griffin declined to speculate on when the SRPPF will actually start making pits, saying as a contractor he would rather not speak for the feds. Griffin did say the design work is 100% complete and SRNS is awaiting a critical decision from DOE and NNSA that will clear the path for full construction activity. 

SRNS currently employs 7,200 people at Savannah River. The NNSA procurement process to select a new prime contractor has been underway for about a year and Griffin expects a new limited liability company (LLC) will be announced by NNSA within a year. 

 The other major contractor at SRS, BWXT-led Savannah River Mission Completion (SRMC), also spoke at the council meeting. SRMC President Tom Burns recapped recent successes with the site’s liquid waste mission, including another jumbo Saltstone Disposal Unit coming online to permanently store treated salt waste. 

The overall mission, which includes removing more than 30 million gallons of Cold Ware-era liquid waste from 43 remaining underground storage tanks, is pacing faster than it ever has, Burns said. He alluded to recent 30-day records for multiple parts of the waste treatment, including 727,211 gallons of waste treated at the Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF), and 16 canisters of sludge waste filled at the neighboring Defense Waste Processing facility (DWPF). Both facilities treat radioactive waste forms, with the sludge product being stored temporarily on site, and the salt waste going into the SDUs for permanent disposal. 

With the accelerated work, Burns said the goal is still to complete the waste mission by 2037. However, that will depend on adequate funding for the next decade, and the reliability of the waste treatment facilities. If those factors cause a regression, Burns said the more realistic timeline would be 2041.

 “We’ve never been at a higher, technical confidence of being able to complete by 2037,” Burns said. “But that largely depends on the funding parameters that we have.”

Savannah River Mission Completion has a 10-year contract, valued at $21 billion, which runs through October 2031.