Sister Ardeth Platte, the nun who breached the perimeter of the Y-12 National Security Site in 2010 as part of an anti-nuclear protest, died in her sleep last week in Washington at age 84, media reported.
Platte, by the time of her death a well-known anti-nuclear-weapons protester, served time in jail for her trespassing — the first of such acts, by separate groups, that ultimately resulted in a shakeup of the physical security arrangements at Y-12 in Oak Ridge, Tenn., where the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) makes nuclear-weapons secondary stages.
Platte got four months for her unauthorized entry into federal property. She was not part of the group that slipped into Y-12 in 2012 and vandalized some federal property, although the 2012 trespassers also included nuns.
After the two incursions, then-Y-12 prime contractor B&W Y-12 fired WSI Oak Ridge: the site’s GS4-owned security subcontractor. Centerra has run physical security at Y-12 ever since and is interested in retaining the work as part of the next combined contract to manage Y-12 and the Pantex Plant.
After the second nun infiltration in 2012, the NNSA removed Douglas Fremont from his post as security chief for the semi-autonomous Department of Energy nuclear weapons agency. However, Fremont remains in the federal service and in 2019 was appointed chief of staff for the NNSA — a post he still holds, according to the agency’s most current organization chart.
Fool Me Twice …
If Sister Platte and her spiritual fellows have a legacy inside the fence at Y-12, it may be the fence itself, which is scheduled for significant upgrades in the 2021 fiscal year that began Oct. 1.
Under the West End Protected Area Reduction Project (WEPAR) scheduled to start construction this fiscal year, the NNSA plans carve some 70 acres out of Y-12’s high-security protected area, reducing the size of that critical national security zone by about 50%.
“WEPAR supports efforts to modernize our high-security boundary and includes the insulation of a perimeter intrusion detection and alarm system and a new entry control facility,” Dale Christenson, NNSA’s federal project director for the Uranium Processing Facility and overseer for capital projects at Y-12, said this week in a virtual conference held by the Tennessee-based Energy Technology and Environmental Business Association. “We plan to authorize the start of construction on WEPAR in the next few months and it will complete in 2025.”
WEPAR hit Critical Decision 1, the milestone where the NNSA picks its favored means of meeting a mission objective, in 2018. Back then, the agency thought construction would start in fiscal year 2020 and wrap up in 2023. The Sandia National Labs prime contractor will contract out the WEPAR construction, according to a notice the Honeywell-owned National Engineering and Technology Solutions of Sandia posted online last week.
The NNSA spent some $81 million on WEPAR between 2017 and 2020, with spending peaking at more than $56.5 million in 2018. Under the short-term federal budget now holding spending at 2020 levels through Dec. 11, WEPAR has more than double the annual funding the NNSA requested for this year: the annualized equivalent of $25 million.
