UPF ahead of the newest schedule, Y-12 site manager said

WASHINGTON — Construction on the Uranium Processing Facility at Y-12 National Security Complex is about 70% complete and ahead of the current schedule, the site manager told the Exchange Monitor recently.

The Uranium Processing Facility (UPF) is the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) next-generation factory for nuclear-weapons secondary stages.

“So the current baseline schedule, and of course, it’s been revised over the years, but really, since last December, the uranium processing facility is actually operating ahead of that schedule that was published last year,” Gene Sievers, site manager at Y-12 in Oak Ridge, Tenn., said last week at an industry gathering in Washington, adding that it was ahead by a “couple of weeks.”

Sievers did not say what the project’s new cost and schedule estimates were. An NNSA spokesperson this week that “[t]he revised baseline [for UPF] has not been completed at this time.”

In its 2025 budget request, NNSA said it would keep Y-12’s aging Building 9212 online longer than planned to churn out the secondary stage components. UPF was supposed to replace Y-12 by 2025 or so, but the date has slipped into the next decade.

In March, NNSA said in its 2025 budget request that UPF would cost $9.3 billion to complete by September 2030. NNSA pegged those figures to the best-guess budget projections, or Future-Years Nuclear Security Program, it included with its 2025 budget request. The ongoing rebaselining might come up with different numbers, the agency said.