The U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) strategy to reboot its tritium-production enterprise went about as smoothly as it could have in fiscal 2019. And even if it is not a perfect microcosm of the whole nuclear security enterprise, it’s tough to ignore the similarities.
First, as with just about everything else it makes or buys, the NNSA needs more tritium. Ongoing and planned weapons modernization programs, the B61-12 bomb, the W88 Alt 370 submarine warhead, the W80-4 cruise missile warhead and the W87-1 intercontinental ballistic missile warhead, all are hungry for the stuff.
That means the NNSA needs more facilities to process tritium for insertion into nuclear weapons, more reactors to produce the radioactive hydrogen isotope in the first place, and more trucks and containers to move it.
Also, as with the special nuclear materials, uranium and plutonium, the semiautonomous NNSA is the only game in town when it comes to tritium. No other government agency or group knows how, or is allowed, to produce bulk tritium, which boosts the power of thermonuclear weapons.
The only customer for tritium, the Defense Department, is a customer only in the sense that you’re a customer for part of your cell phone’s battery. So, neither the vast Pentagon contracting community nor commercial markets are available to share costs, expertise or helping hands with the NNSA, when it comes to tritium production and processing. For the most part, you’re a DOE contractor or you aren’t playing.
And of course, like the NNSA nuclear security enterprise writ-large, the tritium enterprise is national in scope.
The Battelle-managed Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington state designs tritium-producing burnable absorber rods, which are fabricated by Westinghouse subsidiary WesDyne in South Carolina, then irradiated in a commercial light water reactor operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority. They are finally melted down at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., where the Fluor-led Savannah River Solutions packs the extracted tritium gas into new reservoirs for nuclear weapons.
The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in June put Holtec International under contract to build new containers to transport tritium-producing rods to and from the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar nuclear power plant. The roughly $5 million firm-fixed-price contract obliges the company to deliver two HI-STAR PBT casks, dedicated trailers, and other equipment by 2023. There was some competition for this award, and Holtec clawed its way to the top of the heap.
On Sept. 3, the NNSA modified WesDyne’s contract to manufacture tritium-producing burnable absorber rods in Columbia, S.C., bringing the total value of the firm-fixed-price contract to about $160 million through 2024. The NNSA could extend the pact into the early 2040s, according to the new government procurement site, sam.gov.
The Tennessee Valley Authority in May received approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to irradiate up to 1,792 tritium-producing burnable absorber rods in Watts Bar reactor Unit 2 in each refueling cycle. Watts Bar Unit 1 — which irradiated 1,104 rods in 2018 during its 15th cycle and was to irradiate 1,584 in 2019 — has shouldered that work alone since 2003. The NNSA says it wants to begin irradiating rods in Unit 2 in November 2020: 1,104 of them during its fourth cycle. The agency looked, as of mid-November, on track to make good on those plans.
The Savannah River Site fired up a second tritium furnace in June, paving the way for the NNSA to double the number of annual extractions performed at the site by 2021 to four: an on-time milestone for both the agency and recently reupped management and operations contractor Savannah River Nuclear Solutions. The contractor will be around at least for another year: over the summer, the Energy Department extended its management and operations deal though September 2020 and holds options on two more one-year options that would stretch the pact through September 2022. That could keep Fluor and the rest of the team in the driver’s seat for the next extraction milestone.
Meanwhile, the NNSA’s Tritium Sustainment account has even enjoyed a little insulation from this year’s round of budget gridlock in Washington. Fiscal 2020 began on Oct. 1 without Congress passing any budget bills. When lawmakers instead approved a stopgap continuing resolution that froze spending at 2019 levels through Nov. 21, Tritium Sustainment wound up with the annualized equivalent of $290 million: about $20 million more than the agency sought for the current federal budget year.
That, however, is a reach for a silver lining during yet another contentious appropriations season. In the budget realm, particularly in a year like this, it gets much easier to differentiate the tritium program from the rest of the nuclear security enterprise, or at least much harder to ignore the incongruities.
The main one? The program is much smaller than some of the others. And the longer a continuing resolution goes, the longer the NNSA goes without its desired funding for programs that are more expensive and prioritized higher than tritium.
The 800-megaton gorilla this year, of course, is plutonium pits. At $360 million or so, the 2019 budget has only half the funding the NNSA requested for its Plutonium Sustainment account in fiscal 2020: the bill-payer for planned nuclear-weapon core factories at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Savannah River Site.
Then there’s the Uranium Processing Facility at the Y-12 National Security Site in Oak Ridge, Tenn. The NNSA in March 2018 authorized construction of key buildings for the next-generation uranium hub. The new facility, which the agency says it can finish by 2025 for no more than $6.5 billion, will replace most of the work now handled in the Cold War-era Building 9212, including purifying uranium metal and manufacturing uranium-fueled secondary stages for nuclear weapons. Uranium Processing Facility construction needs a $30 million boost, year-over-year, to $730 million in 2020, according to the NNSA.
“We’re looking at where we can move funding insofar as [continuing resolutions] will allow us to do so,” NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty told reporters earlier this month during a breakfast talk at the George Washington University in Washington. “We’re working very closely with OMB [the White House Office of Management and Budget] and the administration to see what we can do to continue our important programs to modernize the infrastructure as well as the stockpile and our workforce initiatives.”
That’s about as candid as any agency head will get with the media about their plans to take money from programs that have it and give it to programs that want it.
Meanwhile, the tritium enterprise has its own construction project to plan.
That is the Tritium Finishing Facility (née Tritium Production Capability), which unlike the Uranium Processing Facility is not yet under construction, and unlike planned plutonium-pit factories does not face a 50% shortfall in a yearlong continuing resolution.
Actually a pair of facilities — one for nuclear processes, one for non-nuclear processes — the Tritium Finishing Facility will rehome deuterium and tritium processing currently handled at Savannah River Site’s H-Area Old Manufacturing Facility. The facilities would, among other missions, receive and inspect old tritium reservoirs and pack up and ship out new ones refilled on-site. The old ones are checked to see how they have aged, the new ones are sent to the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas, to be installed in nuclear weapons in need of a tritium refill.
The NNSA is not close to breaking ground on the new buildings yet, but it did request $27 million for the Tritium Finishing Facility in 2020. That would cover preliminary designs and preparation of safety basis documents for the facilities.
The NNSA wants the Tritium Finishing Facility to open for business by Sept. 30, 2031, according to the 2020 budget request. An agency spokesperson said in late November that the project should reach its CD-1 milestone in December. That is the point in DOE project management where a program office settles on the general shape of the program — formally, a preferred alternative — and roughs out a cost range to be winnowed down to a specific cost estimate later, at CD-2.
