The Nevada National Security Site (NNSS) suspended most of its nuclear operations in late March because of COVID-19, but expansion of the site’s underground subcritical testing laboratory came back online in the first week of April.
Expanding the existing U1a Complex, an effort known formally as the U1a Complex Enhancements Project (UCEP), will allow installation of new hardware in the underground facility that will help the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) assess the aging of refurbished nuclear weapons, such as the planned W80-4 air-launched cruise-missile warhead.
The semiautonomous Department of Energy branch estimates the whole UCEP effort will cost more than $525 million, with construction wrapping in fiscal 2024. That excludes related U1a lab costs, such as the new $1 billion X-Ray camera to be installed in the expanded underground test facility, once mining is done after 2024. Known as the Advanced Sources and Detectors project, the camera would give scientists and designers better images of plutonium’s behavior during subcritical tests.
Honeywell-led Nevada site prime Mission Support and Test Services is subcontracting the mining of extra space in the U1a Complex, but has not identified the sub. The complex houses the current subcritical testing lab, where the NNSA explosively compresses plutonium to determine whether it has retained its destructive potential over the decades.
“Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, UCEP activities paused in mid-March when the NNSS assumed a Mission Critical Operations status,” an NNSA spokesperson in Washington wrote Tuesday in an email. “UCEP mining activities resumed on April 6 after the [Nevada site] moved to a Limited Operations status.”
The site remained in limited operations status at deadline Friday, part of an NNSA-wide effort to curb the spread of the viral disease. Most nuclear operations ceased as of March 23, the NNSA spokesperson said. On March 24, the site ceased operating its low-level waste facility, where the Department of Energy disposes of radioactive waste from current and legacy nuclear-weapon programs.
It was not clear whether this operational lull would delay any of the Nightshade subcritical tests planned in U1a for calendar year 2020. A spokesperson for the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, which is leading the tests, deferred to NNSA headquarters for comment. Headquarters did not reply to a query by deadline for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor.
The NNSA planned three Nightshade tests – A, B, and C – in 2020, according to the agency’s latest budget request. Once the agency shoots a subcritical test at the U1a Complex, it can take weeks or even months to reset for the next shot.
The estimated cost of expending the U1a Complex increased significantly over the winter, as the whole NNSA substantially revised its future budget needs. The agency is now requesting $160 million for UCEP in 2021 alone, which is the peak spending year. That is well above the $48 million forecast a little over a year ago. The U1a Complex Enhancements Project has a roughly $35 million appropriation for fiscal 2020, which ends Sept. 30.
Before the federal budget dropped in February, NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty orchestrated a successful effort to convince President Donald Trump to increase the agency’s 2021 budget to about $20 billion, from the $16.9 billion the NNSA forecast last year it would need in 2021.
The NNSA said previous budget estimates far undershot what the agency requires to rebuild nuclear-weapons production and testing infrastructure abandoned after the end of the Cold War. Like the Pentagon, the NNSA is working on a 30-year nuclear security modernization program that started in 2016 under the Barack Obama administration, and which is supposed to keep U.S. nuclear forces operational into the 2080s.
