The National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) B61-12 life-extension program management faces some issues with scheduling, risk mitigation, quality assurance, and reserve funding, the Department of Energy’s Inspector General’s Office (IG) found in a report released Tuesday.
The report offered a number of recommendations to address the issues; the NNSA said some have already been resolved, while work on others is ongoing.
The B61-12 program is intended to extend the life of the B61 gravity bomb for 20 years at an estimated cost of $8.1 billion, with its first production unit scheduled for delivery by March 2020. The Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories conduct most of the design work for the refurbishment program for the B61, which is part of the United States’ extended deterrent for its NATO allies.
The B61-12 program is the first to incorporate the NNSA’s new approach to life-extension program management. The agency has required its sites to use an earned value management system to coordinate the schedules and work performed under the program in order to keep it on schedule and within cost.
The IG found several areas for program management improvement, however. These include scheduling issues, such as misalignment between the master and site schedules. The two schedules should be in sync, the IG said, because, as an example, “design agencies must complete a component design before production engineers can build the component.” The IG also noted that site schedules sometimes featured tasks that were out of proper sequence for nuclear-weapon production.
Another issue involved risk mitigation deficiencies; for instance, some risks were not assigned specific mitigation actions. In other cases, “schedule and cost impacts of realized-risks could not be identified,” the IG said, noting that half of the risk mitigation actions in the program’s risk database for Sandia and Los Alamos were behind schedule.
The report highlighted one example of proper risk mitigation action: To address the danger of exposing the bomb to extreme thermal environments for which the B61 had not been tested – conditions that could cause component failure – Los Alamos planned two thermal tests “to increase the confidence that exposure to such thermal environments will not fracture the new high explosive charges for the B61-12.”
The IG also found quality assurance deficiencies, such as Sandia officials’ inability to offer assurance that certain component redesigns would address previously unresolved safety and reliability issues. The report noted that since the time of the audit, Sandia had conducted reviews and offered evidence that those issues were being addressed.
The final issue identified by the IG involved lack of justification about whether program sites had enough reserve funds to address program risks and uncertain costs that could occur.
“The identified issues occurred because NNSA Defense Programs generally lacked requirements for the conduct of LEPs using new project management tools and techniques,” the IG said. Without improvements to these tools, the program may not be able to sufficiently manage costs, schedule, and risks to deliver the first production unit within cost and on schedule, it said.
According to NNSA spokeswoman Francie Israeli, the agency’s Defense Programs office in 2013 directed implementation of this new management program, with the B61-12 and W88 Alt 370 being the first programs to implement the new standards.
“The B61-12 LEP was the first to pilot these new management tools at the same time as NNSA began to formulize the requirements for all major alterations and LEPs,” Israeli said. “The lessons learned from the B61-12 pilot effort have been incorporated into updated requirements and guidance documents.”
The IG recommended that the NNSA administrator ensure the life-extension program better aligns its master and site schedules, includes risk mitigation actions into the site schedules, incorporates unresolved issues into the design process for both nuclear and non-nuclear components, and factors reserve funds into cost estimates. NNSA defense programs should complete program management procedure development for its weapon systems, it also said.
Agency management agreed with the recommendations and said corrective actions have been either completed or planned to address the issues, but added that the report “understated the significant accomplishments and increased management effectiveness associated with the B61-12 LEP.” Management’s letter noted that the program has completed corrective actions for two of the IG’s recommendations, and will complete the rest by the end of fiscal 2016.
Israeli said that the life-extension program “has remained on track to complete all four actions recommended in the report, and has been working toward these recommendations as part of its already established process to satisfy recommendations from baseline reviews in previous years.”
“Overall, the B61-12 LEP is on track, having just been authorized for Phase 6.4 production engineering on schedule and budget after four years of engineering development, and after three successful flight tests and independent validation by the US Air Force that the B61-12 baseline design meets all military requirements,” Israeli said.
IG Concludes Sandia Needs Better Tracking of Nuclear Safety Design Issues
Another IG report released Monday found that the Sandia National Laboratories has not fully implemented its system to track “nuclear safety soft spots,” or nuclear weapons safety-related design issues.
The report said that while Sandia developed a process to track these safety issues, it did not fully implement this system, which did not always contain updated information on soft spots for all weapon systems.
While agreeing with the IG’s recommendations to address the situation, Sandia management “noted that the report findings did not indicate that weapon systems have unaddressed safety concerns or that nuclear safety requirements are not met,” according to the IG.
In 2008, Sandia’s Surety Assessment, Engineering, and Analysis Center found 23 high-priority nuclear safety soft spots, along with unfinished or zero plans to resolve those issues, the IG said. It also said Sandia did not have a formal tracking system to log the actions taken or planned to address the problems.
Sandia in 2008 developed a soft spot general engineering document that listed “agreed-upon, prioritized soft spots and their dispositions for each active weapon system,” but those documents had not been updated as required since 2011, the IG said. Moreover, a program initiated in 2011 to improve the system “languished for several years without a defined scope or firm completion date,” according to the report.
The IG reviewed 85 of the 143 soft spots in the formal tracking system covering all weapons systems and determined that some updated information Sandia found through studies and tests did not appear in the general engineering documents for at least 36 soft spots. This included, for example, lightning test results that “revealed new information to further characterize a soft spot common to at least four weapon systems.”
The IG said a well-maintained tracking system is necessary to document design weaknesses and counter loss of knowledge in the event of employee turnover. The report recommended that NNSA’s Sandia Field Office manager ensure development of a project plan with a firm completion date for the general engineering document improvement project. Management agreed to develop the plan and resume updating the tracking system.
Sandia spokeswoman Sue Holmes said by email that the “existence of a soft spot does not mean nuclear safety requirements are not met.”
“Although the [NNSA] mandates nuclear safety requirements, there is no specific requirement to identify or report soft spots,” Holmes said. “Sandia itself developed the rigorous soft spot reporting methods, and identifies, analyzes and decides what, if anything, should be done about any given soft spot.”
“The issues identified are primarily ones of centralizing and standardizing documents to track and report soft spots. They do not reflect on nuclear safety requirements, which have been and will continue to be met. Sandia will continue to identify and address soft spot issues while finishing the effort to improve the centralized general engineering document system,” Holmes said.
She also noted that Sandia provided NNSA with a project plan on July 29 with timetables for the updates.
