The National Nuclear Security Administration wants to expand its supplier base for the highly engineered glove boxes needed to speed up production of new plutonium pits for nuclear weapons.
The airtight, pressurized containers, are in high demand at NNSA facilities such as Los Alamos National Laboratory, which is gearing up to produce at least 30 softball-sized plutonium pits per year to provide the primary trigger for new warheads.
In hopes of buying more gloveboxes faster, NNSA plans to hire Los Alamos-based Merrick Strategic Management Solutions, with an anticipated contract award date of August 28, to design demonstration boxes that will be used to evaluate potential fabricators’ abilities to make new ones to lab specifications.
Under a sole-source contract announced Tuesday, Merrick will “provide the subject matter expertise to support fabricator capability development in accordance with design specifications, and review fabricators ability to meet the necessary design specifications.”
“The information gathered through this program will be provided to the NNSA Matrixed Execution Team (MET) Glove Box Working Group (GBWG), and the information will be utilized to expand glovebox procurement efforts and the number of capable glovebox fabricators to meet NNSA efforts to support pit production,” the notice said.
Merrick in 2018 was named a subcontractor to Triad National Security for the design, and engineering of capital construction and infrastructure improvements at Los Alamos under Triad’s ten-year management and operating contract, worth about $2.5 billion per year.
There are so few companies within the U.S. — all equipment used in PF4 must be manufactured in the United States with domestically sourced components — with the proper capabilities to machine gloveboxes to exacting NNSA standards that Los Alamos is practically the only customer, according to Robert Webster, Los Alamos’ deputy director for weapons.
“Our effort has basically saturated the market,” Webster said during the recent tour of the lab’s PF4 Plutonium Facility. A few other industries use gloveboxes as sophisticated as those at Los Alamos, namely the pharmaceutical and aerospace industries, Webster said. But NNSA is by far the most demanding customer, Webster said during a rare tour of the facility on June 22.
