DOE prepares for transition of Savannah River Site management

The SRS landlord transition, which will occur on October 1, 2024, is when primary authority, accountability, and site stewardship responsibility for SRS is transferred from DOE–Savannah River Operations Office (SR) to the NNSA–Savannah River Field Office (SRFO).

Background: In October 2018, the DOE announced its decision to transfer the primary management of SRS to the NNSA, deeming it necessary due to the steadily increasing NNSA security mission requirements at Savannah River and the concurrent progression of the DOE-EM cleanup mission toward a defined end state.

The transition will include the transfer of four major areas of responsibility from DOE-SR to NNSA-SRFO: the Savannah River Nuclear Solutions management and operating contract, including landlord and essential site services; pro-force contract; K Area Complex; and environmental permits/agreements.

The summit: Details of the transition were discussed by DOE personnel during the SRS Landlord Transition Summit, held October 31–November 1 at the site.

According to the DOE, the summit was designed to provide detailed briefings to the NNSA organizations that will be assuming the SRS landlord function, responsibilities, and interfaces on both an internal and external level, and to continue optimizing communications flow between DOE and NNSA personnel to accomplish a seamless site transition.

“We wanted to ensure that we had as an outcome of this summit some sense of where we are today and what we will end up looking like,” said Sherri Robinson, DOE-SR transition steering committee lead. “We have the ‘as is’ and the ‘to be.’ In order to get to the ‘to be,’ we had to start talking collaboratively as a unified group between EM and NNSA. This was the platform we chose to go with.”