March 17, 2014

GAO REPORT ON CMRR-NF EXPECTED TODAY

By ExchangeMonitor

The Government Accountability Office is expected to release a report today on the National Nuclear Security Administration’s now-deferred Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement-Nuclear Facility, and the top Democrat on the Senate Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee has suggested the report won’t reflect favorably on the project. Much has changed since the committee chaired by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) requested that the GAO examine the facility: the Obama Administration decided earlier this year to defer work on the project for at least five years, finding a variety of alternatives more fiscally palatable than the project’s $3.7 to $5.8 billion price tag.

Citing the forthcoming GAO report, Feinstein suggested that the project’s estimated cost did not include some non-weapons program related missions. The GAO report “found that the cost of building a new plutonium facility at Los Alamos would cost six times more than projected,” Feinstein said. “However, NNSA would have eliminated certain critical capabilities that were part of the original project scope to avoid even more cost increases. For example, the facility would not have been able to accommodate other plutonium-related missions for homeland security and nuclear proliferation. The result may have been requests for even more funding at a later date to build more facilities to house capabilities that should have been included in the plutonium facility.”

Comments are closed.