Federal watchdog wants report on worker safety at Savannah River’s yet-to-open pit plant

December 15, 2023
By Dan Parsons

A federal nuclear safety watchdog wants the National Nuclear Security Administration to respond to concerns over worker safety at the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility in just over a month.

Three different NNSA safety assessments of the in-development plutonium facility have now found concerns with worker safety, specifically that project leaders are allowing workers to “use their senses to detect accidents such as a glovebox spill or fire,” the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) wrote to Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm on Nov. 28.

Signed by DNFSB Chair Joyce Connery, the letter set Jan. 19 as the deadline for a final DOE response. The plutonium processing facility, which NNSA has estimated will open in 2036 or later, will make at least 50 of the 80 pits the Pentagon says it needs the agency to produce starting in 2030.

Members of the DNFSB toured the facility in August and noted concerns “that project personnel assert facility workers can use their senses to detect accidents such as a glovebox spill or fire and exit the area before receiving significant radiological exposure,” the board said in its November letter to Granholm. 

“Using this assumption of worker self-protection, project personnel avoided designating safety significant controls, such as gloveboxes, glovebox ventilation, continuous air monitors, and glovebox fire controls, that other DOE plutonium processing facilities have traditionally designated.” the board wrote.

A Sept. 7 report by the NNSA associate administrator for environment, safety, and health found similar concerns “that project personnel over-relied on the expectation that facility workers would take self-protective actions to avoid significant radiological exposures from postulated hazards. The report also found that project personnel too often selected mitigative controls over available preventive controls for hazard scenarios.”

A third report, by DOE’s Office of Enterprise Assessments, also documented concerns with facility worker protection at the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility in December 2021, the defense board said. 

“Now that three of DOE’s applicable nuclear safety organizations have documented safety concerns with the project’s safety approach, the Board is renewing its request for a final response,” DNFSB said. 

Savannah River should produce its first plutonium pit, a nuclear weapon’s fissile first-stage core, three years after the plant comes online, J.C. Wallace, executive vice president and National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) chief operations officer for Savannah River Nuclear Solutions said in October. 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.
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