The National Nuclear Security Administration gave Bechtel National the go-ahead to begin about $4 billion worth of construction on the Uranium Processing Facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn., marking the official start of the busiest, costliest years of the project to date.
However, the agency still has not divulged the official cost and schedule estimate for the Uranium Production Facility (UPF), which will mold and shape uranium for nuclear warheads, and for the nuclear reactors that power some U.S. warships and submarines.
The three buildings approved for construction last week are: the Main Process Building, which will house the hands-on uranium work for U.S. defense programs; the Process Support Facilities that will store materials necessary for that work; and the Salvage & Accountability Building that will encompass waste-handling space and equipment to recover usable uranium from waste generated in the Main Process Building.
According to the NNSA’s fiscal 2019 budget request, the total projected construction bill for these three facilities is about $4 billion over 10 years. The projection includes roughly $60 million spent on the Main Process Building since 2016 for long-lead procurement and preliminary construction that paved the way for the work just approved to start.
The NNSA officially began designing the UPF in 2011. According to agency project management rules, big projects such as UPF only get an official cost and schedule estimate at the project milestone known as Critical Decision 2, or CD-2. To reach that milestone, the agency and its contractor must subject their internal estimates to review by experts unaffiliated with the project. The milestone at which the agency approves construction, CD-3, follows.
The UPF had hit both those milestones by March 21, an NNSA spokesperson in Washington said by email Thursday. The total cost of the project is $6.5 billion and it will be complete “by the end of 2025,” the spokesperson said. The official declined to be more specific, or to confirm whether those figures were the same established in the UPF baseline set down during CD-2.
In its 2019 budget request, the NNSA said the UPF baseline will be discussed in more detail in the agency’s fiscal 2020 budget request, which will notionally be published in February 2019.
A spokesperson for UPF contractor Bechtel National also did not respond to a request for comment. The Reston, Va.-based company is building the Uranium Processing Facility under a subcontract to Consolidated Nuclear Security: the NNSA’s prime contractor at the Y-12 National Security Complex at Oak Ridge.
Bechtel is the lead partner on Consolidated Nuclear Security, which did not reply to a request for comment this week.
The UPF will eventually replace Y-12’s World War II-era 9212 complex.
In the 2018 omnibus appropriation bill passed last week, Congress gave the NNSA the roughly $660 million requested for the project for the current budget year. However, neither the bill nor the detailed report appended to it said how much of that would go for the three UPF subprojects just approved. The project has a total of seven subprojects.
Clues may be gleaned, however, from the agency’s 2019 budget request, which includes the latest public forecasts for these three and other UPF subprojects.
The NNSA will spend some $2.9 billion over the 10 years spanning 2016 to 2025 on the largest subproject UPF subproject, the Main Process Building, according to the 2019 budget request. The request assumes spending a little under $220 million on the building in fiscal 2018. Costs are slated to rise sharply next year and peak at nearly $580 million in 2019.
The UPF’s Process Support Facilities — which house water, chilled air, and specialty chemicals and gases needed for uranium work in the main building — are the next most expensive construction effort for the facility. These clock in at an estimated $1 billion or so in the eight years ending in 2025, including about $120 million for 2018, the 2019 budget plans says. Construction costs will peak at around $240 million in 2020.
Construction of the Salvage & Accountability Building, for waste handling, would cost around $117 million in the eight years ending in 2025.
