It could be another year before the U.S. Department of Energy publishes an official cost estimate for the multibillion-dollar Uranium Processing Facility (UPF) that Bechtel National is building in Oak Ridge, Tenn., the agency said last week in its detailed fiscal 2019 budget justification.
At the same time, significant portions of the UPF at the Y-12 National Security Complex are set to reach the Critical Decision 2 milestone in March: the point in the DOE project-management rubric at which project officials usually produce the official cost and schedule estimates the agency requires before authorizing construction.
“The established definitive scope, schedule, and cost baselines as part of the CD-2/3 submission and approval will be included in the FY 2020 CPDS,” the National Nuclear Administration wrote in the 2019 budget justification it released Feb. 23.
A CPDS refers to a construction project data sheet: a standardized accounting of a construction project cost, schedule, and purpose routinely included with the Department of Energy’s annual budget request to Congress. Critical Decision, or CD, 3 is approval to begin construction.
An official with the department’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) confirmed last week that the agency was set to baseline UPF by the end of March.
“We’ll set the cost and schedule baseline and we’ll also receive approval to begin construction of the nuclear portions of the project.” Kelly Cummins, NNSA associate assistant deputy administrator, said Thursday during a panel discussion at the ExchangeMonitor’s annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit.
The Uranium Processing Facility will eventually replace the World War II-era 9212 complex, reshaping uranium enriched elsewhere into forms suitable for use in nuclear warheads and the nuclear reactors that power some Navy warships and missile submarines.
Unofficially, the NNSA estimates UPF will cost $6.5 billion to complete by 2025. The agency has promised Congress it will keep to that cost and schedule, provided lawmakers meet the annual funding requests for the massive construction effort.
For fiscal 2019, the NNSA requested just over $700 million for UPF: about a 22-percent increase from the 2017 enacted budget that so far has essentially carried into fiscal 2018 while Congress has funded government operations under a series of five stopgap budgets.
