Nuclear security in 2023: pits press on; UPF stumbles; industry consolidation looms

Amid an increasingly chaotic international security picture, the post-pandemic landscape for the National Nuclear Security Administration came into clearer focus in 2023 as the agency pressed on with plans to produce plutonium pits, reckoned with a major infrastructure project that got off the rails, started competition for a major new site management contract, and braced for another round of industry consolidation.

As delays mounted for the number-one mission, producing the fissile cores of nuclear-weapon first stages known as pits, Jill Hruby, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), acknowledged early this year that the larger of the agency’s two planned pit factories, the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility in South Carolina, would likely have to produce more than the military’s minimum order when it opens next decade.

For a baseline, the NNSA is on the hook for making at least 80 new plutonium pits annually. Thirty of those will be cast at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and 50 will be cast at Savannah River. In February, Hruby said “the increase over minimum should be at Savannah River.” Los Alamos at one point this year looked to be on track to start casting pits around 2030, four years later than hoped. Savannah River looked to be more than five years behind its target of opening in 2030.

Meanwhile, delays and overruns continued to spiral for the Uranium Processing Facility, or UPF, at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn. The bad news broke in 2022 and got worse this year.

UPF, once slated to be complete by the end of  2025 at a cost of no more than $6.5 billion, will now cost between $8.5 billion and $8.95 billion and be done in the first half of fiscal 2029, NNSA has said. The project will have to be rebaselined, so those figures were not even final when some members of Congress this summer started to gripe about NNSA’s plans to make UPF whole.

As the NNSA and its contractors worked this year toward skyline changes driven by the pit program and UPF, they also watched a fault line crack in what could be a seismic round of industry consolidation. 

In the fall, giants of the defense and nuclear security Amentum and Jacobs announced they would merge. The combination has ramifications across DOE, but most immediately, it would winnow the field of candidates vying to take over management of the Pantex Plant in Texas. 

The consolidation of the two giant Department of Energy contractors shrunk the number of potential players for the $30 billion Pantex deal, which at least four teams are circling. Sources said one of those teams was led by Amentum and another by Jacobs. Those joint ventures could be wearing the same uniform if the merger goes through in 2024 as planned.

Among the other rumored Pantex suitors are Fluor, BWX Technologies (BWXT), Bechtel National, Honeywell and Huntington Ingalls Industries. 

Amentum was understood to be part of Pantex Production Partners, formed in May and registered with the federal procurement system in July. The company is owned by Huntington Ingalls Industries, according to filings with the System for Award Management.

Jacobs formed a separate entity called Pantex Mission Alliance in June and registered it in July with the federal contracting system. That team is based out of a Jacobs office in Tennessee, according to filings.