Construction of a massive new facility to make plutonium bomb cores for the first time at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina is proceeding without an overall schedule and with “less than adequate” project management. Lack of these key planning elements could cripple the project, according to an evaluation released by DOE on February 13, 2025.
An up-to-date project cost estimate and an “integrated master schedule” is essential to project success yet a contractor performance review for Fiscal Year 2024 reveals that the proposed Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility (SRPPF) lacks both, underscoring a growing risk of continued schedule slippage and increasing cost overruns. Contractors carry out the pit-plant work, under supervision by a small amount of DOE employees.
Annual “Performance Evaluation Reports” (PERs) of contractor performance at seven DOE sites across the country controlled by the DOE’s nuclear weapons division, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), were obtained on February 13, 2025 via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by three public-interest groups that monitor DOE sites: Savannah River Site Watch (Columbia, SC), Nuclear Watch New Mexico (Santa Fe, NM) and Tri-Valley CAREs (Livermore, CA). As is mandated for such “frequently requested documents,” NNSA posted the PERs on line on February 14, along with annual “fee determination letters” - at https://www.energy.gov/nnsa/nnsa-frequently-requested-documents.
The SRPPF project - also called the SRS Plutonium Bomb Plant - managed by private contractor Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS), was last estimated in the Fiscal Year 2025 NNSA budget request to cost between a stunning $18 billion and $25 billion (page 271). This massive cost, which should catch the eye of those looking to slash the federal budget, makes the project one of the most expensive in U.S. history. The project is for a mission to make new plutonium pits - bomb cores - initially for new nuclear warheads, designated the W87-1 and W93. A long-range goal is to replace the pits in all 3800 warheads, further revealing that the aim for such a massive stockpile is not “deterrence” but rather to keep the U.S. on a dangerous footing to fight a full-scale nuclear war.