The National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) nuclear weapons dismantlement activities may offer benefits – in addition to nonproliferation and arms control – that involve the nuclear enterprise workforce, according to NNSA Administrator Frank Klotz. The agency’s fiscal 2017 budget request includes $69 million to meet Secretary of State John Kerry’s commitment announced last year that the U.S. would accelerate retired nuclear warhead dismantlement operations by 20 percent.
Under the current plan, the U.S. aims to dismantle weapons retired before fiscal 2009 by fiscal 2022. However, the increased fiscal 2017 budget request seeks to increase the pace of operations to meet its goal one year earlier, in fiscal 2021. This request, $17 million above the fiscal 2016 enacted amount, will allow NNSA sites that host dismantlement work to hire more staff, Klotz said at a House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee hearing Tuesday on his agency’s budget. The NNSA’s budget requests a total of $9.2 billion for its weapons activities, which include dismantlement.
“We estimate that we will need to hire between 35 to 40 people at Pantex to do this increased workload. We’ll also need to hire an additional 10 people, we estimate, at Y-12 to do this work,” Klotz said, referring to the Pantex Plant in Texas and the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee. Once recruited, “if the need arises elsewhere at Pantex or at Y-12 for other work that we do . . . then those individuals would be ideally suited,” Klotz said. He noted that boosting the workforce to meet weapons dismantlement goals would also serve the purpose of “starting to build that next generation of workforce” at both sites.
Klotz said a “graying” workforce – a third of which will be eligible to retire within the next few years – is the NNSA’s top challenge but that initiatives such as the agency’s graduate fellows program seek to identify and develop future technical talent. He added that despite a drop in popularity of academic strategic studies programs after the end of the Cold War, “there’s been sort of a resurgence of interest, a lot of it fueled not so much by the nuclear strategic force side of things, but the nonproliferation, the nuclear security field.”
Klotz also highlighted progress with construction of the Uranium Processing Facility (UPF) at Y-12, which will move uranium processing operations out of Building 9212 by 2025 at a cost of no more than $6.5 billion. The NNSA’s modular approach for the project will segregate various activities by hazard and security category in different buildings, Klotz said. The first part of the project, the site readiness subproject, involved haul-road and bridge construction, relocation of portable water lines and a road, sediment basin construction, and a parking lot demolition. The NNSA initiated the subproject in 2013 and celebrated its completion last March, under budget and on time.
“We are now in the midst of work related to the site infrastructure and services subproject, which will continue to prepare us for the actual construction of the UPF facility once we are ready to do that,” Klotz said. This project is expected to cost about $78 million and be completed by April 2018, “so a lot of the work in 2017 will be devoted to that,” in addition to preparations for the next two major UPF subprojects, he said.
Asked by Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-Neb.) to assess the existing interagency architecture for nonproliferation, Klotz said the NNSA has a “very good interaction at the interagency level” between the agencies carrying out nonproliferation activities, such as the Departments of Energy, State, Homeland Security, and Defense. “But I think there’s also something that’s unique about the current situation,” he said, citing President Barack Obama’s 2009 Prague speech as “galvanizing guidance” that “has seized all of us who work in this particular area, so we know we should and we can work together.”
“In terms of setting up formal structures, I’ve often thought that communities of interest in which people are drawn together because they share a common goal, a common objective, or a common need to pool resources is one of the greatest motivators in terms of making people work together,” Klotz said.
