The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and Bechtel National have finished the Site Infrastructure and Services subproject for the Uranium Processing Facility (UPF) at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
The UPF will eventually replace the World War II-era 9212 complex, reshaping uranium enriched elsewhere into forms suitable for use in nuclear warheads and the nuclear reactors that power some Navy warships and missile submarines.
“Completing the SIS subproject is an important step in paving the way for future subprojects and to ultimately deliver UPF,” Dale Christenson, UPF federal project director for the NNSA, said in a press release Thursday.
The SIS subproject is the second of seven subprojects that will construct UPF, the NNSA said in the release. Work included the completion of a concrete batch plant and a 65,000-square-foot construction support building.
The agency has promised Congress it will finish UPF by 2025 at a cost of no more than $6.5 billion, provided lawmakers meet funding requests. The NNSA is slated to finish its official cost estimate for major parts of the facility by the end of this month, but those estimates might not be published until next year, according to the agency’s fiscal 2019 budget request.
For fiscal 2019, the NNSA requested just over $700 million for UPF: about a 22-percent increase from the 2017 enacted budget that so far has essentially carried into fiscal 2018 while Congress has funded government operations under a series of five stopgap budgets.
