LANL OFFICIAL: CMRR-NF WON’T ACHIEVE 90% DESIGN, NO BASELINE TO BE COMPLETED

Because of the administration’s decision to defer construction of Los Alamos National Laboratory’s multi-billion dollar plutonium facility, a definitive price tag for the high hazard nuclear structure remains elusive. “We expect that most of the design deliverables will be completed at the end of this fiscal year,” Steve Fong, the NNSA project manager for LANL’s Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement facility, said last night at a public meeting in Los Alamos. “With that, the nuclear facility design is basically in close-out mode.” Asked by nuclear watchdogs at the meeting if that meant there would be answers to some of the outstanding questions about the project, Fong said that the plan was to take the design to the most logical stopping point, so it could be picked up and used by project teams on the other side of the hiatus. But the current finishing work would not include input from the actual vendors, because they would not be under contract until the project starts up again. “As part of the instruction that we’ve received in the President’s budget request, they’ve asked us not to go forward with vendor design,” Fong said. “So we’re not going to achieve 90 percent design. Will we baseline this facility?  No we will not—that’s what the next teams will do.”