The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has given the go-ahead for the roughly $145 million High Explosives Pressing Facility at the Pantex Plant in Texas to begin full-scale operations.
The facility can press some 2,500 pounds of conventional high explosives a year, and shape up to 500 explosive hemispheres, the semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear weapons agency said in a May 16 press release.
Nuclear weapons depend on conventional explosives to begin the chain reaction that causes a nuclear detonation.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built the High Explosives Pressing Facility under a firm-fixed-price contract for the NNSA. The Army Corps broke ground on the facility in 2011 and finished construction in 2017. Since then, NNSA has slowly worked to certify that the facility is safe enough to produce the volume of high explosives for which it was designed. Like other NNSA facilities, the pressing facility would go through multiple readiness reviews after construction before hitting the operational release milestone: the agency project management threshold for ramping up to full throughput.
The new 45,000-square-foot facility replaces and consolidates older facilities, some of which were around 50 years old, according to the NNSA’s presser.
