The relationship between the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and the Department of Defense “has never been stronger,” the head of the semiautonomous Department of Energy stockpile steward this week.
U.S. Strategic Command “is our customer. But they don’t think of themselves as our customer, they think of themselves as their partner,” NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty said Tuesday. “And we think of them as our partner.”
Gordon-Hagerty was among several high-ranking DOE officials to speak at a meeting of the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board at DOE headquarters in Washington. After her prepared remarks, board member Norman Augustine, a retired Lockheed Martin chairman and CEO, asked Gordon-Hagerty to explain how today’s NNSA was dealing with the “challenges” of “coordinating between DOE and the Department of Defense.
Gordon-Hagerty, who marked her first year as NNSA administrator in February, kept her replies vague, but told Augustine that one step was for the two agencies to “institutionalize our relationship so those that come after us are able to build on what we’ve put in place.”
To that end, Gordon-Hagerty said she plans to release an NNSA vision statement and a governance and management document “in the very near future.”
An NNSA spokesperson said those documents will eventually be made public, but did not say when that might happen.
The NNSA maintains and refurbishes the nuclear warheads used on the weapons U.S. Strategic Command deploys. The two interact officially on the joint DOE-Pentagon Nuclear Weapons Council, chaired by the Pentagon’s undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment.
Besides better coordination with her Pentagon customer-partner, Gordon-Hagerty’s self-identified No. 1 priority within the NNSA is to build a complex capable of annually producing 80 of fissile warhead cores, called plutonium pits, by 2030. The Donald Trump administration set that goal in its 2018 Nuclear Posture Review.
Under this plan, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico will crank out 30 pits a year by 2026 in its soon-to-be-expanded Plutonium Facility. The Savannah River Site in South Carolina would make 50 pits a year by 2030 in a converted facility built from the remains of the now-canceled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF).
Building 50 pits a year at MFFF is “not going to be an easy task,” Gordon-Hagerty said. “That’s a hot start. That doesn’t mean we’re just going to turn on the switch and by 2030 do that. We’re going to have to have cold starts from now until 2030 and be able to maintain that capability.”
