Los Alamos National Laboratory management prime Triad National Security is whipping together plans for addressing the major weapons projects of the future and cleaning up after major lab faux pas of the past.
Triad, a three-way partnership of Battelle, longtime Los Alamos operator the University of California, and Texas A&M University, took over as the New Mexico lab’s site-management contractor on Nov. 1.
That very week, Triad announced due dates for a series high-level initiatives that, among other things, will set out the nonprofit’s strategy for turning the lab into a production hub for fissile weapon cores called plutonium pits.
According to a Nov. 9 report by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, the federal government’s nuclear health-and-safety watchdog, Triad has given itself four big jobs to complete before next November:
- Delivering an integrated plan for mission activities at the Plutonium Facility within six months.
- Assessing outstanding criticality safety evaluations within six months.
- Revalidating capital project baselines within six months.
- Training first line managers of hazardous operations areas within a year.
The Plutonium Facility, PF-4 for short, is at the center of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) future plans for the storied nuclear weapons lab. The facility is set to produce the first war-ready plutonium pits manufactured in the nuclear security complex since 2011.
The Defense Department needs 80 new pits annually by 2030 to replace the old plutonium cores in the U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile fleet. The NNSA, a semi-independent branch of the Department of Energy, wants to split future pit production between South Carolina and Los Alamos, with the latter on the bleeding edge of the scheme.
Not only does Los Alamos have to start pumping out pits before a proposed facility in South Carolina, it also must devise the method and means of manufacturing the pits from existing fissile material.
Los Alamos is on tap to start making pits in 2026, ramping up to 30 annually by 2030, with a reserve capacity to produce even more. The NNSA plans to make 50 pits a year by 2030 by converting the canceled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina into a production plant.
Former Los Alamos Director Terry Wallace once said Los Alamos could handle all 80 pits by itself.
Los Alamos will start expanding PF-4 for the expanded pit mission this year. The South Carolina facility is still winding down construction for its previous plutonium disposal mission, and Congress has yet to provide funds for converting it into a pit factory. The NNSA is expected to seek that funding in 2019.
Triad’s lab management contract is worth about $20 billion over 10 years, including five one-year options.The base period alone is worth roughly $10 billion. Triad replaced incumbent Los Alamos National Security, which had been on the job since 2006.
Los Alamos National Security, the sole for-profit entity ever to run Los Alamos, lost its contract after a series of nuclear safety lapses. They included the 2014 underground radiation release at DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant that was traced to a badly packaged drum of waste from Los Alamos.
Triad has characterized the previous incumbent’s failures as a consequence of too many corporate loyalists focusing too closely on their own areas of responsibility, at the expense of the lab’s overall performance and reputation. Los Alamos National Security was led by Bechtel National with the University of California, along with junior industry partners AECOM and BWX Technologies.
