Nobody will lose their jobs when the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) assumes management of the Savannah River Site in South Carolina from the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management next yr, in response to a recently published transition plan.
“All incumbent employees will probably be retained,” the plan states. That pertains no less than to employees hired under several contracts, price billions of dollars, that NNSA will take over from Environmental Management on Oct. 1, 2024.
Once in command of the location, NNSA’s responsibilities will include the general $28 billion site management contract and its about 5,000 employees.
The now-310-square-mile facility near Aiken, South Carolins was the locus of plutonium production and tritium to be used in the first stages of U.S. nuclear weapons from the Fifties until 1992, when the Department of Energy’s focus turned to cleansing up the waste generated by Cold War-era nuke production. At that time, the location began operating under the auspices of the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management.
Now the location’s focus is returning to nuclear weapons, because the NNSA and military look to recapitalize your complete U.S. nuclear stockpile. Savannah River will eventually produce no less than 50 plutonium pits a yr against a national goal of constructing 80 nuke cores per yr sometime after 2030. The opposite 30 pits per yr will probably be made on the expanded PF-4 Plutonium Facility on the Los Alamos National Laboratory in Latest Mexico.
“Given the steadily increasing NNSA mission requirements on the SRS and the concurrent progression of the EM clean-up mission toward defined end state(s), a choice was made by EM and NNSA to transition the SRS from EM to NNSA leadership,” a transition plan published Sept. 13 by the NNSA said.
Because it stands, the plan assumes primary site management responsibility and bookkeeping will transfer from Environmental Management (EM) to NNSA in fiscal yr 2025, which begins on Oct. 1, 2024.