Congress should consider raising the legal limit of full-time employees allowed to work at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the Government Accountability Office said in a report this week.
The NNSA may employ no more than the equivalent of 1,690 full-time employees, according to the federal law that created the Department of Energy’s semiautonomous stockpile steward. That limit is preventing the agency from hiring people who could provide oversight for key programs including “to manage and oversee work on the agency’s uranium and plutonium missions,” the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in its biennial report on high-risk federal government operations.
For that reason, the GAO said, “Congress should consider working with NNSA to ensure that the statutory cap on staffing is re-examined and consistent with NNSA’s human capital needs.”
The House and Senate Armed Services committees write the NNSA’s policy bills in Congress. The panels could address the agency’s head-count limits in the National Defense Authorization Act: an annual, must-pass policy bill that usually emerges from behind closed doors in the early summer and takes until September or later to finish.
Currently, the NNSA relies on the World War II-era Building 9212 at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee to process uranium for weapons and naval reactors, and an undersized production factory at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico to produce fissile warhead cores called plutonium pits. Los Alamos has not made a pit since 2011 and has nowhere near the throughput needed to hit future pit-production goals.
So, the NNSA is refurbishing its uranium and plutonium processing infrastructure as part of the 30-year, $1-trillion, nuclear stockpile modernization and maintenance program started by the Barack Obama administration in 2016. That expansion entails multiple, multibillion-dollar construction projects in New Mexico, Tennessee, and — according to the agency’s current plan — South Carolina.
To produce more pits, NNSA is expanding the Plutonium Facility at the Los Alamos National Laboratory at an estimated cost of $2.5 billion to $3 billion over about eight years. The facility will be finished in 2024 and producing 30 pits a year by 2026, the NNSA says. It could currently produce about handful of pits a year.
The NNSA also plans to convert the recently canceled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., into a facility capable of making 50 pits a year by 2030. The agency has not yet said what it might cost to build the proposed South Carolina pit plant, which is not yet authorized or funded by Congress.
To process uranium into the forms needed for nuclear weapons and the nuclear reactors that power Navy warships and submarines, the NNSA is building an enormous new Uranium Processing Facility at Y-12. The agency broke ground on the main building in March 2018, kicking off the peak spending years of the project with a $700 million appropriation. The NNSA estimates the facility will cost $6.5 billion to complete by 2025.
On Tuesday, the head of Y-12 prime contractor Consolidated Nuclear Security told Nuclear Security & Deterence Monitor that an unusually rainy winter has put construction of the Uranium Processing Facility a little behind schedule.
“We have had a lot of rain in Tennessee, so I would say we are behind on concrete placement,” Consolidated Nuclear Security President and CEO Morgan Smith said after a Capitol Hill hearing. “But overall, I think everything is recoverable.”
Smith said the foul weather put construction no more than “weeks behind” schedule.
