Plutonium plant inside the abandoned MOX shell gets a $23.5 billion price and a 2038 finish date

DOE signed the performance baseline and authorized full construction on Oct. 15. The Main Process Building will convert the roughly 400,000-square-foot structure started in 2007 as the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility into a plant that makes at least 50 plutonium pits a year. The wider complex covers about 160 acres, and NNSA expects more than 3,000 additional workers at peak construction, ENR reported.

The price is more than double the top of the $6.9 billion to $11.1 billion range DOE approved in 2021. NNSA's fiscal 2026 budget papers had shown more than $22 billion and a finish in September 2035. In October 2024, DOE let the project set its baseline at 60% design maturity instead of the usual 90%, and acknowledged that late design changes could cause rework.

Before the baseline, NNSA approved 10 early packages for buying and site work, worth about $3.1 billion, covering temporary utilities, wall demolition, equipment removal, gloveboxes and bulk materials, according to the Government Accountability Office. GAO said some packages could not proceed as planned because design drawings arrived late. It also cited trouble hiring design engineers and found that the site contractor, Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, a Fluor and HII partnership, fell short on some performance targets. By June 2025, Fluor had placed 243 of the 320 subcontracts it planned for building gloveboxes.

NNSA says final design was finished before the Oct. 15 approval. The next phase covers more work inside the old MOX structure plus underground utilities and support infrastructure. The project is a cost-plus-award-fee job tracked as its own contract line item, so NNSA can grade construction separately from site operations.