ALEXANDRIA, VA. — A mining and construction project at the Nevada National Security Site critical to the next generation of non-explosive, nuclear-stockpile testing should have its cost and schedule set in June, the head of the site’s management contractor said here Tuesday.
An independent cost estimate of the U1a Complex Enhancements Project’s (UCEP) Infrastructure and Laboratory and Support Infrastructure subproject began “a few days ago,” Mark Martinez, president and senior manager of the Honeywell-led Mission Support and Test Services, said Tuesday after a panel presentation here at the Exchange Monitor’s annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit.
“Largely, the mining is nearing completion, but there’s additional mining that’ll be done,” Martinez told the Monitor. But “most of it’s about bringing in the utilities and buying all of the … power and supplies” that test personnel need to comfortably conduct future subcritical experiments.
Independent cost estimates, required for projects with a cost of more than $100 million, are performed within the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) but by people outside the evaluated project’s team. These reviews are precursors to the milestone known as CD-2/3 that sets a project’s cost and schedule.
NNSA is expanding the Nevada site’s U1a underground subcritical testing laboratory to accommodate a new x-ray camera nicknamed Scorpius and lab space that will be used, among other things, to assess refurbished nuclear weapons including the W80-4 cruise-missile warhead scheduled to enter service with the Air Force’s Long Range Standoff Weapon around 2030.
An early cost estimate for the Laboratory and Support Infrastructure subproject was several hundred million dollars and trending upward, according to the NNSA’s 2022 budget request, released in March 2021. Exactly how much the new underground laboratory and support infrastructure will cost, and how long they will take to build, will be determined when the project hits its CD-2/3 milestone around June.
UCEP’s other subproject, Access and Life Safety Infrastructure, will cost about $50 million and be finished by September 2023, according to an NNSA website.
UCEP is part of the NNSA’s larger enhanced Capabilities for Subcritical Experiments project, which in addition to the mining at Nevada includes development of the roughly $1-billion Scorpius x-ray imager, formally called the Advanced Sources and Detectors project. Scorpius was to replace the 2000-vintage Dual-Axis Radiographic Hydrodynamic Test facility.
Scorpius will give the NNSA’s weapons designers a better idea of how plutonium is aging during tests that explosively compress small amounts of the fissile material inside of thick steel spheres — though not to the point where the plutonium, undergoes a self-sustaining nuclear chain-reaction. The U.S. calls this a zero-yield standard.
In its 2021 budget request, the NNSA estimated UCEP would be finished by December 2025, and that Scorpius would be finished by October 2025 “to meet the W80-4 design validation.” The agency estimates the first war-ready W80-4, or first production unit, would be finished by October 2025.
