On the heels of the arrival of the New Year, here’s a look at what to expect in 2022 at the National Nuclear Security Administration, its sites and its partners.
Production Office Protest
A bigger deal for industry perhaps than the Joe Biden administration’s imminent nuclear posture review — a type of review that in recent history has resulted in the rebuilding rather than the removal of the remaining nuclear-weapons production sites — is the fate of the potentially decade-long, $28-billion contract to manage the two main National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) production sites, the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas, and the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
NNSA in November awarded the deal to Nuclear Production One, a Fluor-led team with Amentum as a partner.
Weeks later, losing bidders led by BWX Technologies and Bechtel National protested the award with the Government Accountability Office. The Bechtel-led bidder — the company is also the senior partner on incumbent Consolidated Nuclear Security, which NNSA is mostly booting off the sites, leaving years of contract options to wither on the vine — was concerned by the source selection official’s evaluation, a spokesperson said.
As things stood Friday, the Government Accountability Office was still mulling the aggrieved parties’ protests, and Consolidated Nuclear Security was scheduled to remain on site until April 1, the planned end of a four-month transition period to Nuclear Production One that started in December.
On the heels of the award, NNSA Administrator Jill Hruby said “the selection of the new contractor was made with great care.”
Defense Work at Savannah River: How and Who?
The Savannah River Site figures to remain a nuclear weapons hub for decades to come. The former plutonium production complex will, if things go according to the current plan, house the largest, newest plutonium pit production site in the country sometime next decade. Also there, on the Georgia line, the NNSA will continue to harvest the tritium required for regular nuclear weapons maintenance.
But it’s an open question, going into the new year, whether the Savannah River Site’s current business model will endure for even as long as the rest of President Biden’s first term.
Before Thanksgiving, the Department of Energy’s office of Environmental Management, which owns the current Savannah River management and operations contract through which NNSA pays for pit and tritium work, pulled the plug on a competition for a follow-on contract. The office had as of Friday not restarted the competition.
“DOE is taking this action to reexamine the RFP to ensure it provides for the best possible mission execution and value for the taxpayer as the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is committed to increasing its scope of work at Savannah River, including the full execution of the two-site pit production strategy and construction of the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility,” the Office of Environmental Management said late last year.
There was no official comment from DOE, any branch of it, after that, but the scuttling of one of the biggest business opportunities of the year recalled to some the great debate of the Trump administration, in which the NNSA proposed a mighty Savannah River shakeup: either the nuclear-weapons agency could take over the site lock, stock and barrel from Environmental Management, or the NNSA could administer its own contracts at the site.
Alternatively, the semiautonomous weapons steward proposed at the time, the NNSA could simply find somewhere else to do nuclear weapons work.
None of those things happened, but then, neither did the plan to continue with the old arrangement, where the NNSA passes money through an Environmental Management contract that includes mostly landlord services and support for the site’s other big contractors, such as the BWX Technologies-led team set to take over the site’s liquid-waste cleanup mission. Cleanup is set to dominate Savannah River, from a funding and employment perspective, until the mid- or late-2030s.
New Principal Deputy Administrator for Defense Programs
Marvin Adams, unless the Senate will not have him, will sometime next year become the head of nuclear weapons programs at NNSA headquarters. He’ll need to pass muster with the Senate Armed Services Committee first, and the committee had not scheduled him for a nomination hearing as of Friday, at least in part because Biden had not officially nominated Adams as of Friday.
Biden on Dec. 15 announced his intention to nominate Adams as deputy administrator for defense programs and NNSA headquarters in Wasington.
A professor of nuclear engineering at Texas A&M University in College Station, Adams is already involved with a couple of the big nuclear-weapon-site contractors, mostly as an observer and advisor at Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos, where A&M is a partner on the current management and operations contracts.
If confirmed, Adams will replace the last-standing member of the Trump administrator, Charles Verdon. Verdon was acting administrator of the NNSA for a time after inauguration day, owing to a vacancy created when then-Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette essentially fired Trump’s NNSA Administrator, Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, in late 2020.
Nuclear Posture Review
Then-candidate Joe Biden excited arms control proponents in and out of government in a good way, and proponents of the existing nuclear modernization regimen in a worrying way, when he wrote before election day in 2020 that “the sole purpose of the U.S. nuclear arsenal should be deterring — and, if necessary, retaliating against — a nuclear attack. As president, I will work to put that belief into practice, in consultation with the U.S. military and U.S. allies.”
Now, with Biden’s first nuclear posture review notionally weeks away — it will come bundled with a national defense strategy required by law to appear in January — some prominent disarmament advocates fret that the 46th President’s nuclear posture review may not meaningfully alter the course chartered by his two most recent predecessors.
Certainly, these people worry, an outright declaration that the U.S. will never be responsible for the world’s next nuclear strike appears to be off the table.
On the other hand, former Defense and NNSA officials forecast last year that Biden the President was warming to ideas that Biden the candidate appeared to cold-shoulder. Among these is the nuclear-armed, sea-launched cruise missile proposed by the Donald Trump administration: one of the few changes, along with a low-yield, sea-launched ballistic missile and the continuing maintenance of a megaton-capable gravity bomb, that Trump made to U.S. nuclear posture set years before by the Barack Obama administration.
The howls of the disarmament advocates increased about nine months into the Biden administration, when a longtime Washington staffer some of these people considered one of their own was ousted from the Pentagon in what was officially ascribed to a reorganization of nuclear niches of the building’s bureaucracy.
After that reorg, veteran House Armed Services counsel Leonor Tomero, who joined the administration right around inauguration day to quarterback the Biden nuclear posture review, was out on the street.
Some in the arms control community blamed this on pressure from Republican Senate staffers. Others said privately that Tomero was overwhelmed in her new role, clashing with or disregarding her bosses — including Biden appointees — grating her own staff and appearing too passive for some in the interagency debates and competition attendant to each nuclear posture review.
Tomero herself said nothing to the press after the news broke.
Meanwhile, coordination of the nuclear posture review fell to John Plumb, the Biden administration’s assistant-secretary-for-space-policy-designate and, according to John Harvey — Obama’s former deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical and biological defense programs — “a real grown-up in this area.”
Domestic Uranium Enrichment Strategy
About two years have passed from the time the NNSA thought it would pick the foundational technology for the country’s next all-domestic uranium enrichment cascade, which the agency will have need of by the 2050s to create tritium for nuclear weapons that, sooner or later, need more of it.
Later this century, the need becomes keener still. Eventually, the existing stockpile of highly enriched uranium suitable for nuclear weapons and naval fuel will run out.
As of Friday, the NNSA was still considering two options for the next domestic enrichment facility: the AC-100 technology that Centrus Energy Corp. is using to demonstrate enrichment of high assay, low-enriched uranium at DOE’s Portsmouth Site near Piketon, Ohio, and a smaller technology developed in-house at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
The Oak Ridge technology had consistently lagged in maturity behind the Centrus technology, which along with Centrus’ supply chain has gotten a chance to prove itself out in the Portsmouth demo funded by DOE’s Office of Science.
Centrus and the DOE at times last year found themselves in the crosshairs of lawmakers who questioned the agency’s longstanding interpretation that only domestically mined and enriched uranium is suitable for U.S. defense programs.
Under a different interpretation, some of these people hold, the U.S. arms of foreign-owned companies could provide the NNSA with the needed uranium. Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) brought up the issue in a May hearing of the Senate Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee.
Tritium Production Shifting to Higher Gear
Not long after the turn of the century, the Tennessee Valley Authority started chipping in for the national defense by irradiating tritium producing burnable absorber rods in its Watts Bar reactors.
In late 2020, the authority’s Watts Bar Unit 2 started irradiating the tritium-producing rods, joining Unit 1, which had been at it since 2003.
The first Unit 2 cycle to include rods — the reactors irradiate the specialized material in the course of producing electricity for the surrounding region — did not go exactly according to plan. The output achieved in that cycle was about half of what the NNSA estimated it would get for the fiscal year, but the agency, metaphorically speaking, still has levers to pull and knobs to turn to get the program back on schedule.
In one of the first significant defense-nuclear developments of calendar 2022, the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission are set to host a public meeting Jan. 19 about boosting irradiation of tritium producing burnable absorber rods in the Watts Bar reactors.
The Fate of Fusion Experiments
NNSA-funded high energy density physics facilities are going to be booked just about solid by experiments involving nuclear weapons this year. That’s more or less a fact of life for places that produce conditions close to a nuclear explosion and owe their existence to money provided by a nuclear weapons agency.
Still, even the NNSA will admit that its outlook about the largest of these facilities, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility, is a little different now than it was this time last year.
In December, an NNSA official in Washington acknowledged that the agency had been moved by August’s record energy output at the National Ignition Facility — a headline-grabber fueled by a massive public relations push from the lab. Congress hardly needed to read about it, having by that time already agreed to provide the occasionally maligned laser research hub with more funding that the Biden administration request.
Speaking of funding, finding more of it for non-defense experiments at the high-energy facilities is still “a big problem,” according to Mark Anderson, NNSA’s assistant deputy administrator for research development, test, and evaluation. But the National Ignition Facility’s summer milestone “has changed our thinking a little bit.”
The NNSA has not since volunteered any information about whether or to what extent it plans to tackle the “big problem,” but if the intent is really there, it could well show up in the agency’s fiscal year 2023 budget request, notionally due to be published the first week of February.
Nuclear Propulsion for the Australian Navy
The Australia, United Kingdom, United States partnership, AUKUS, to provide the former with nuclear submarine propulsion was announced September to global fanfare, fluster, finger-wagging and even fury.
It was, truly, an international incident, even if nothing really happened.
The partners gave themselves 18 months to figure out how they’ll repeat a feat that’s been pulled off only once before, when the U.S. shared naval nuclear propulsion with the U.K., helping to create the kingdom’s one-legged nuclear fighting force.
So, while the final details of AUKUS are actually an item to watch for 2023, it stands to reason that something about the proposed technology transfer will creep out before then. The defense industry serving the U.S. Navy, not least of all BWX Technologies, is thirsty for more details about AUKUS, to the point where the hosts of the annual Naval Submarine League symposium near the Pentagon in November made certain not to let Adm. James Caldwell, the head of Naval Reactors, leave the building before addressing the elephant in the room full of private sector executives.
