A vendor to the Kansas City National Security Campus made thousands of nuclear weapons parts with the incorrect alloy because “product drawings were not clear,” forcing the Pantex Plant to pause servicing on multiple nuclear weapons in mid-September while the National Nuclear Security Administration confirmed the parts were safe to use, a campus spokesperson said Wednesday.
Kansas City discovered the mistake, which affected 72 types of components including connectors, caps and covers, after the site shipped the components en masse to the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas, which subsequently installed them in U.S. nuclear weapons.
Reached by email this week, neither Kansas City nor Pantex would quantify the time lost to the pause, and subsequent restart, of weapons servicing. The federal Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety board, which disclosed the process and manufacturing hiccups in a recent report, said Pantex had to obtain “special exception releases (SXR) for each affected component in order to release the paused programs.”
Kansas City discovered the apparently ambiguous production drawings after some “quality review improvements” the spokesperson for the Honeywell-operated plant told Weapons Complex Morning Briefing on Wednesday.
“The alloy that should have been used was a default alloy listed in an industry standard,” the Kansas City spokesperson wrote. “However, the alloy that was used also met all the chemical and mechanical requirements of the design specifications.”
Kansas City believes its recent quality review improvements will “minimize similar reoccurrences going forward.”
According to the defense board, Kansas City notified Pantex prime Consolidated Nuclear Security of the mistake, and Pantex “paused operations on multiple programs” until it could secure the all-clear from weapons design agencies to go ahead and use the components with the other-than-specified alloy.
“[T]he Design Agencies thoroughly reviewed the use of the alloy and confirmed it was appropriate for use in the particular components and should be used going forward in production,” the Kansas City spokesperson said. “Notably, the alloy used was already an accepted alloy for use by the Nuclear Security Enterprise and is currently used in other weapon systems.”
A Pantex spokesperson declined to say exactly how many nuclear weapons programs, and which types of weapons, were affected by the unexpectedly prolonged process of clearing the alloyed components.
