March 17, 2014

SENATE ARMED SERVICES BACKS NNSA PURSUIT OF MODULAR PU STRATEGY

By ExchangeMonitor

The Senate Armed Services Committee has signed off on the National Nuclear Security Administration’s plans to pursue a modular building strategy at Los Alamos National Laboratory to meet the nation’s plutonium needs. Los Alamos and NNSA officials conceived the plan after the Obama Administration deferred work on the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement-Nuclear Facility, which the committee initially opposed. However, Strategic Forces Subcommittee Ranking Member Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) signaled earlier this year that he would be supportive of the new approach, which could save money by using smaller buildings as well as existing facilities at the lab, and the committee offered its lukewarm backing in the report accompanying the committee’s version of the Fiscal Year 2014 National Defense Authorization Act that was made public yesterday. “The committee encourages the Department of Defense and the Nuclear Weapons Council to examine the business case for such a concept and if proven feasible, to proceed with engineering design and cost estimation,” the committee said. “If a detailed cost estimate past an initial business case analysis is performed for this modular building approach, the committee directs the Government Accountability Office to review the detailed cost estimate.”

Fearing that sequestration and tight budgets could derail the B61 life extension program, the committee also directed the Pentagon and the NNSA to develop a plan to mitigate the impact should the NNSA fail to complete a First Production Unit by 2019. At a Strategic Forces Subcommittee hearing earlier this year, Sandia National Laboratories Director Paul Hommert noted that sequestration and the Administration’s $537 million FY 2014 request could force the B61 to slip off its plans. “The committee understands the importance of the Mod 12 life extension but is concerned about meeting the 2019 deadline for the version deployed by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies and needs to know what backup plan, if any, the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy have to provide temporary lifetime extension of the existing weapons if the Mod 12 schedule slips, as it most likely will.” The committee also tasked the Government Accountability Office with examining the life extension workload at the NNSA, where life extension activity on up to five warheads could be underway at once over the next decade: the W76, the B61, the W78/W88 interoperable warhead, a cruise missile warhead, and the W88 fuse program. “Concurrency, funding delays, or program slips in any one of these programs can impact the others given they all use the three production facilities,” the committee said.

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