As the National Nuclear Security Administration ramps up spending on nuclear-weapon refurbishments, the Kansas City, Mo., plant that produces the non-nuclear components of these weapons is rushing to expand the footprint it right-sized in 2012, and preparing to lease more production space this summer.
That is according to a report released Friday by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), “Modernizing the Nuclear Security Enterprise: NNSA Is Taking Action to Manage Increased Workload at Kansas City National Security Campus.”
To cope with the near-term demand, the Honeywell-managed Kansas City National Security Campus site plans to lease an unspecified amount of commercial space to store unclassified materials off site. That will free up some production space at the main site, GAO wrote, but will still require the site to lease around 250,000 feet of additional production space — roughly 30 percent more than the total production space available now at the plant, according to GAO.
NNSA headquarters must approve the request to lease additional production space, GAO said. The plant expects to award the competitively selected production-space lease “by summer 2019.” according to GAO’s report.
In 2012, NNSA moved production of non-nuclear weapons parts out of a World War II-era facility with about 3 million square feet of production space and into the current facility, which has roughly 1 million square feet of production space, GAO wrote.
Long term, GAO said, the modern Kansas City site needs 400,000 additional square feet of production and administrative space to handle work expected for: the B61-12 gravity bomb life-extension; the W80-4 air-launched, cruise-missile warhead life-extension; and a major alteration for the W88 submarine-launched ballistic-missile warhead.
Such an expansion would take five years to complete, once it starts, and would increase Kansas City’s footprint by about half, according to Friday’s report. GAO did not say when construction might start.
The Kansas City National Security Campus will conduct an analysis of alternatives for the expansion and then “submit a combined office and production space expansion project plan to NNSA, which will determine final costs and timelines,” GAO wrote in the report. The congressional watchdog did not say when Kansas City expects to complete the analysis, which will set NNSA’s strategy for expanding the plant.
Editor’s note, 04/16/2019, 10:55 Eastern: NNSA’s facility in Missouri is now known as the Kansas City National Security Campus.
