A new cost and schedule estimate for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s new factory for nuclear weapon secondary stages will be done “soon” and will not change the scope of the project, the secretary of energy said this week in congressional testimony.
The “baseline change proposal” for the Uranium Processing Facility at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., is “underway,” Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm told Rep. Charles Fleischmann (R-Tenn.) Wednesday during a hearing of the House Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee.
Fleischmann, who chairs the committee, asked Granholm when the rebaselining might be complete, but Granholm did not say and Fleischmann did not follow up.
“It’s nearing completion but the numbers for the cost and the schedule are not yet finalized,” Granholm said during the hearing. “Scope has not been removed from the baseline change proposal.”
In its 2025 budget request, DOE’s semi autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) said it would keep Y-12’s aging Building 9212 online longer than planned to churn out nuclear-weapon secondary stage components. UPF was supposed to replace Y-12 by 2025 or so.
In its 2025 budget request, the NNSA said UPF might notionally be complete by September 2030 and cost as much as $9.3 billion or so.
However, 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.
A year ago, with the same caveats, NNSA thought the date for UPF Critical Decision-4, the end of construction, might happen as early as 2028 and cost up to $8.95 billion.
Overall, NNSA would receive $25 billion, or $1 billion more than in the fiscal 2024 appropriation, if the agency’s fiscal year 2025 budget request becomes law.
Fleischmann said in a press release he was happy to see continued funding for the Uranium Processing Facility, as well as plutonium pit production, the Sea-Launched Cruise Missile-Nuclear, and a new version of the B-61 gravity bomb, the B61-13.
At deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor, the House Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee had not yet scheduled a hearing on the NNSA’s 2025 budget request with NNSA Administrator Jill Hruby
