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 said Tuesday.
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. “And we think of them as our partner.”
Gordon-Hagerty was one of several high-ranking officials to attend the Tuesday meeting of the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board at DOE headquarters in Washington. Board member Norman Augustine, a retired Lockheed Martin executive, 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.”
Gordon-Hagerty’s self-identified No. 1 priority for her agency is to build a complex capable of annually producing 80 of the fissile warhead cores a year by 2030. The Donald Trump administration set that goal in its 2018 Nuclear Posture Review.
“That’s not going to be an easy task,” the NNSA chief acknowledged.
Last year, early in Gordon-Hagerty’s tenure, the NNSA decided to split plutoniun pit production between the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. By 2030, 30 of those pits would be coming from Los Alamos and the rest from Savannah River.
“That’s a hot start,” Gordon-Hagerty said. “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.”
