March 17, 2014

LAB DIRECTORS MAKE PITCH TO CONGRESS FOR STABLE FUNDING

By ExchangeMonitor

The refurbishment of the B61 bomb, which according to some estimates could cost as much as $10 billion, could be in for further cost increases and schedule delays due to current budget constraints, the head of Sandia National Laboratories said yesterday at a Senate Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee. Sandia Director Paul Hommert said the NNSA’s sequestration-trimmed Fiscal Year 2013 budget and the Obama Administration’s $537 million FY 2014 request for the B61 refurbishment would not be adequate to keep the program on track as it works to complete a First Production Unit by 2019. “From what I can tell now, as a result of sequestration in ‘13 and what we have seen in the ‘14 budget, we are going to slip off of that plan,” Hommert said, referring to the B61 refurbishment plan approved by the NNSA last year. Hommert noted that the delays to the program might not be “dramatic,” but he said they would be enough that “in my view, we will see schedule impact. Schedule impact will lead to cost growth.”

Funding stability was a familiar refrain from Hommert and his fellow lab directors, Los Alamos’ Charlie McMillan and Livermore’s Parney Albright, at yesterday’s hearing. Albright emphasized that stable funding was needed on the planned refurbishment of the W78 and W88 warheads, where he suggested shortfalls in funding for technology maturation issues “add risk to the program” as well as in efforts to maintain the science and technology base across the weapons complex. McMillan pushed for stable funding for an alternate plutonium strategy devised in the aftermath of the deferral of the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement-Nuclear Facility. “If we can have stability that gives us the predictive ability to do things, then we can move forward,” McMillan said. “If it’s constantly changing, it makes it almost impossible for us to do what we would like to do, as well as I know you would like to do.” All of the NNSA’s life extension efforts, as well as its uranium and plutonium capabilities, are tightly scheduled in the agency’s limited production capacity, creating the risk that problems on one LEP or project could have a domino effect. “The current schedules I think have the right priorities in terms of timing,” Hommert said. “The concern is that if those slip significantly … you then have the possibility of stacking up a fair amount of production requirement falling on top of one another early the next decade, and also there’s late design activities that can complicate our ability to support the 78/88. There’s a sequencing and phasing here that it’s important to adhere to.”

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