Major National Nuclear Security Administration projects to modernize nuclear-weapons production infrastructure shot $2 billion past estimated budgets and are collectively overdue by nearly a decade, according to a recent report by the Government Accountability Office.
The overruns have several causes, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in the first of what will become biennial reports on National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) infrastructure upgrade and expansion projects, such as the planned Uranium Processing Facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
“As of March 2023, the NNSA estimated that its portfolio of 18 major projects in the execution phase will overrun their collective cost and schedule baselines,” the report, published August 17, said. “They are a combined $2 billion over their cost baselines and 6.5 years behind their schedule baselines.”
NNSA plans to spend more than $30 billion on its portfolio of major projects with an estimated cost of $100 million or more. Including Department of Defense programs, the 30-year nuclear rearmament program that started in 2016 under the Barack Obama administration will cost about $1 trillion, the Congressional Budget Office has estimated.
Two of the four Uranium Processing Facility projects are a combined $2 billion over their cost baselines and 6.5 years behind their schedule baselines, a campus of planned and under-construction buildings at Oak Ridge will reestablish a domestic supply of uranium used in the secondary stages of nuclear weapons.
Meanwhile, the Plutonium Pit Production Facility project at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico is similarly over budgeted cost and schedule. A subproject called the 30 Reliable Equipment Installation to “design and install new processing equipment needed to ensure the reliable capability to produce plutonium pits” was estimated at $1.936 billion in March.
That is nearly three times the top-end of the approved cost range estimate and the project is now estimated to take four years longer than expected, the GAO found. The NNSA had hoped to produce 30 pits at Los Alamos by 2026.
Lab contractor Triad National Security in May 2022 tasked Merrick with completing the Plutonium Production Facility’s preliminary and final designs, which should be complete in September 2024. Los Alamos is striving to produce at least 30 Plutonium Pits, the fissile material used as the primary stages of nukes, by 2026 but likely will achieve that goal nearer 2030, NNSA officials have said.
At an estimated cost of $600 million, a facility for training Los Alamos personnel to work with plutonium and assemble pits also exceeded its initial high-end budget estimate by about $200 million and will take two years longer than thought to complete, according to the report.
