Held Tells Congress ‘Common Sense’ Approach to Uranium, Plutonium Capabilities Will Be Quicker, Cheaper
Todd Jacobson
NS&D Monitor
4/04/2014
After years of moving toward building massive facilities to modernize its uranium and plutonium capabilities, a scaled back approach to modernizing the weapons complex that is expected to be quicker and cheaper has been adopted by the National Nuclear Security Administration, acting Administrator Bruce Held told the House Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee this week. The strategy includes a new modular strategy to modernize plutonium capabilities at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which has replaced the deferred multi-billion-dollar Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement-Nuclear Facility. And NNSA officials are expected to scuttle plans to build a massive Uranium Processing Facility, with a Red Team likely to suggest constructing a smaller facility that replaces the most glaring need at the Y-12 National Security Complex, the enriched uranium production work in the aged 9212 complex. “If we take a common sense, better-sooner rather than perfect-later approach, we can do all of these within reasonable cost,” Held said. “But if, heaven forbid, we have a nuclear safety accident because we have not done so, then NNSA will truly have failed and we will forever forfeit the trust and confidence of the American people in all things nuclear.”
So whereas the NNSA had once debated how to build two massive, multi-billion-dollar facilities at once, it is now figuring out how to scale back both of them. “We designed out the perfect scope and then we let perfect scope drive cost and schedule,” Held said. “And quite frankly, what we found is those end up being too costly, they take too long, they undermine our credibility with Congress and they leave us in an untenable nuclear safety position.”
Harsh Words on Project Management
Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), the chairman of the subcommittee, had harsh words for the agency’s “serious problems” in project management. He said he was concerned that more affordable alternatives to the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement-Nuclear Facility were never considered, and called the design of the Uranium Processing Facility “bungled”—a reference to the space-fit issue that cost the project approximately $500 million last year. “What are you doing to better ensure that the NNSA is spending its funds developing only the most feasible and affordable alternatives to sustain the nuclear weapons stockpile? And what needs to change to make sure that these mistakes don’t continue to be made and that we do not waste time and money on losing alternatives?” Simpson asked.
UPF: Perfection in 2038 Out, Cost-Effective in 2025 In
UPF as envisioned had grown to a 700,000-square foot facility that was proving too expensive in a time of tight budgets, even after officials reduced the scope of the project to include only replacing 9212’s capabilities and not those found in Building 9215 or Beta-2E. However, project officials had planned to still build the facility to eventually hold those capabilities, driving the cost significantly higher than the government’s current estimate of $6.5 billion. In what appeared to trigger the change of plans on UPF, the Pentagon’s Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation group said late last year that the facility could cost between $10 and $12 billion—and as much as $19 billion under a worst case scenario—and recommended the NNSA take a new look at the path forward for the multi-billion-dollar project. “Our perfect strategy was pushing us to a situation where the cost was going to be on the order of over $10 billion and not get finished until the year 2038,” Held said. “2038 is nearly 100 years after the Building 9212 down at Oak Ridge was created. … So we said we’ve got to do better than this. We have to do something. Let’s not have perfection in 2038, let’s have something much better and much more cost-effective in 2025. And even 2025 is kind of a long way away.”
Held noted that the “decrepit” state of 9212, where Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.) said a chunk of concrete recently crashed to the floor as part of a ceiling collapse, and said it sends a bad message to workers. “The decrepit nature of the facility does not communicate to the workforce that I care about their work environment or their safety, right?” Held said. “We need to do better than that and we need to do better than that sooner than 2038.” Fleischmann himself described the facility as “deplorable,” “antiquated” and “sad,” saying “protection of our workers is so critically important to me and to you and should be to all Americans.”
A Nuclear Safety Issue
Held told Fleischmann that he has had more success recently framing the infrastructure modernization issues as a nuclear safety issue. “When we reach budgetary tightness, a lot of times the instinct is to take risk in infrastructure,” he said. “The way I’ve been rephrasing that in some of the committees, we’re not taking risk in infrastructure; we are taking risk in nuclear safety, and that has a different reaction in the rooms when I say that.”
Held said “necessity was the mother of invention” at Los Alamos when budget pressure forced a move away from CMRR-NF. Instead of building the massive facility, officials are pursuing a strategy that will expand the use of the lab’s Plutonium Facility (PF-4) as well as the recently completed Radiological Laboratory Utility Office Building and bring on modular facilities as needed to expand pit production. Current plans call for the lab to be able to make 30 pits per year in 2026, and 50 to 80 pits at an undetermined time in the future. “So we are letting mission drive the pace and doing it in a much more agile, modular fashion that will probably prove much more mission effective and cost efficient,” Held said.
