Sen, Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) publicly went on the offensive this week against the National Nuclear Security Administration’s slowly gelling plan to shift production of some nuclear-weapon cores to South Carolina from New Mexico.
The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is in the final stages of deciding whether to start manufacturing a select number of plutonium pits at the Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C. In congressional testimony this week, NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty repeated a promise that the Department of Energy will deliver its final recommendation to Congress “on or before” May 11.
That recommendation will cap a three-year study about how the agency can meet the Pentagon’s demand to manufacture 80 pits a year by 2030.
Heinrich, as he told Perry in a December letter co-signed by Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) and Rep. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), said in a Thursday hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee that the NNSA’s study compared an abandoned design for a new pit factory at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico with an undesigned pit plant in South Carolina, giving the agency the wrong impression about how fast it could reach 80 pits a year by splitting production between two sites.
“Spending three years on what I have viewed as a flawed analysis of alternatives does not exactly inspire confidence in the timeline,” Heinrich told Perry from the dais.
Los Alamos is set to manufacture 30 pits a year by 2026, by which time it will have updated its manufacturing capacity with incremental improvements dubbed the modular approach. The design the NNSA studied involved a larger construction project the Senate Armed Services Committee later deemed unaffordable.
To reach the 80-pit-a-year milestone, the NNSA is considering turning the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) under construction at Savannah River into a pit plant. The facility was designed to convert plutonium into commercial reactor fuel as part of an arms-control pact with Russia. The Energy Department agency, however, wants to scrap the facility and treat the plutonium elsewhere at Savannah River.
Heinrich has also complained nobody has studied how much converting the MFFF, which was not designed for pits, would cost.
Meanwhile, Gordon-Hagerty told lawmakers this week that she and Ellen Lord, undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, would soon meet to discuss the results of a pit-production engineering analysis Parsons Government Services is performing for NNSA.
That meeting is set for sometime “in the next several weeks,” Gordon-Hagerty said in a hearing of the House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee. After that, Gordon-Hagerty will make her recommendation to Deputy Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette about whether to use Savannah River for pits. Brouillette will then make a recommendation to Congress on or before May 11.
