Nuclear Security & Defense Monitor took a break over the past two weeks for Congress’ annual summer recess. Our affiliate publication, Weapons Complex Morning Briefing, kept up on the latest news around the nuclear security enterprise and its industry partners. Here’s a recap of what happened while we were out.
After Appeals Defeat, Nevada Wants Judge for Force Plutonium Out
In the latest turn in a nearly year-old legal battle, Nevada plans to ask a federal judge to force the Department of Energy to remove half a metric ton of weapon-usable plutonium shipped to the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS) in 2018, according to court papers.
The state revealed its plan in a procedural motion in U.S. District Court in Reno, filed only days after the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco rejected as moot Nevada’s original strategy to rid itself of the roughly 500 kilograms of plutonium metal.
The suit now resumes in District Court, which had ordered Nevada to file its motion to amend its complaint by today. The state had not done so at deadline for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor.
Nevada sued DOE and its semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) in District Court on Nov. 30, 2018, alleging the agency needed to perform lengthy environmental reviews to ship plutonium to the NNSS Device Assembly Facility. As part of the lawsuit, the state requested an injunction that would have temporarily blocked the NNSA from shipping plutonium to Nevada.
Then, in January, the NNSA revealed in a District Court filing that it had sent the plutonium to the NNSS before the state sued to stop the shipment.
Nevada argued that its injunction request could also cover removal of plutonium from the NNSS. District Judge Miranda Du disagreed, and so did a panel of Ninth Circuit judges. That sent Carson City scrambling back to District Court, where the state and its attorneys their amended complaint, when filed, would “include, among other things, a request that DOE remove the plutonium it shipped here without Nevada’s knowledge or consent.”
Energy Secretary Rick Perry has said the plutonium shipped to Nevada will be removed by 2026 to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, which will use the material to make new fissile nuclear-weapon cores called pits for future intercontinental ballistic missile warheads.
Nevada claimed the NNSA violated federal law by shipping plutonium over the road to the state without performing a more detailed environmental review than the agency wound up doing. The NNSA claims its review of the move, called a supplement analysis, fulfilled its legal obligations.
The plutonium sent to Nevada was half of a 1-metric-ton tranche that had to be removed from the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, under a federal court order in a lawsuit filed by that state, by Jan. 1, 2020. In a July filing in the South Carolina lawsuit, the NNSA said it had removed the rest of the plutonium covered by the 2017 court order from the Savannah River Site and South Carolina. That tranche is believed to have been shipped to the Pantex Plant in Texas.
Former NNSA No. 2 to Lead Government Affairs for Nevada Site Contractor
Neile Miller, former principal deputy administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), has joined Nevada National Security Site operating contractor Mission Support and Test Services as head of government affairs, the company announced Aug. 19.
Miller was No. 2 at the semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear weapons agency from August 2010 through June 2013, according to her LinkedIn profile. She also formerly worked in the White House Office of Management and Budget, where she had oversight of nuclear programs at the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense.
According to the same LinkedIn profile, Miller has been working for Mission Support and Test Services (MSTS) since August 2018.
“Neile Miller was previously a casual employee, since August 2018, before she started as a regular employee in her current full-time role,” a spokesperson for the Honeywell-led contractor wrote in an email.
Mission Support and Test Services also includes Jacobs Engineering and Huntington Ingalls Industries. The company’s contract, awarded in 2017, is worth roughly $5 billion over 10 years, with options.
Miller will run MSTS government affairs from Washington, D.C., responsible for presenting the company’s interests to Congress and DOE. She joins the Nevada site contractor as it begins work on expanding the U1a underground complex that supports subcritical plutonium experiments, and as the former Nevada Test Site plays host through 2026 to 500 kilograms of weapon-usable plutonium shipped to the site over the state’s protests.
Subcritical plutonium experiments help the NNSA gauge, without resorting to nuclear explosive tests, whether nuclear weapons retain their destructive power as they age. The 500 kilograms of weapon-usable plutonium was shipped to Nevada to comply with a federal court order in a lawsuit filed by South Carolina. The material, once to be disposed of permanently, will be used at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico to make the fissile cores of future intercontinental ballistic missile warheads.
Cray Gets $600M NNSA Contract to Build ‘El Capitan’ Exascale Computer
The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has awarded Cray Inc. a $600-million contract to build the El Capitan exascale supercomputer, which the agency wants to start crunching numbers in 2023 at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
Cray must deliver El Capitan in late 2022, the NNSA said in an Aug. 13 press release. The machine “is expected to go into production by late 2023,” according to a separate release from Livermore.
The agency did not reveal more detailed terms of its arrangement with Seattle-based Cray, or say how many responsive requests it received after the solicitation for the machine hit the street in spring 2018.
El Capitan is planned to have a peak performance of more than 1.5 exaflops, or 1.5 quintillion calculations per second, according to Livermore’s press release — much more than the current crop of supercomputers.
As with existing supercomputers at Livermore, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, El Capitan would be capable of high-powered simulations that can help nuclear security professionals understand how existing weapons age, and what modifications might be required to prolong the life of these weapons.
The NNSA is procuring El Capitan as part of the Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project, announced in 2018 by Energy Secretary Rick Perry.
Funding for the program comes from the NNSA’s Advanced Simulation and Computing account. El Capitan had about a $33 million budget for fiscal 2019, and the agency is seeking $58 million for the 2020 fiscal year that begins on Oct. 1. Overall, the NNSA wants roughly $840 million for Advanced Simulation and Computing in 2020, up from the $715 million budget for 2019.
No Outreach to Russia About Plutonium Dilute and Dispose Til Congress Acts, State Dept. Says
There is not yet any need to discuss the U.S. plan to dispose of 34 metric tons of surplus, weapon-usable plutonium by burying it underground, according to the latest version of an annual arms control report by the State Department.
Congress has yet to fund the new plan, so “further steps are needed in this respect before engaging Russia to obtain its agreement to this alternative method of disposition,” the State Department wrote Aug. 8 in its annual “Adherence to and Compliance with Arms Control, Nonproliferation and Disarmament Agreements and Commitments” report.
The U.S. and Russia are getting rid of 34 metric tons of excess, weapon-usuable plutonium under the Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement, which was signed in 2000 and amended in 2011 to allow Russia dispose of some of its plutonium in fast reactors. Originally, the agreement called for both parties to convert excess nuclear material into mixed-oxide fuel made of uranium and plutonium.
Russia in 2016 announced it would “suspend” its participation in the agreement because the U.S. wants to bury its plutonium deep underground using the dilute-and-dispose method — Surplus Plutonium Disposition, in official Department of Energy budget documents.
The agreement allows either nation to switch disposal methods if the other agrees to the switch in writing. The U.S. maintains it has never violated the agreement, and that the 2018 cancellation of the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at the Savannah River Site, the lynchpin of the original U.S. disposal plan, did not violate the agreement.
Meanwhile, the State Department’s 70-page report barely acknowledges the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), which limits the U.S. and Russia to 1,550 deployed strategic warheads on a combination of submarines, bombers, and intercontinental ballistic missiles.
The 70-page document said only that the U.S. complied with the treaty in 2018, and that Washington and Moscow “continued to discuss concerns related to Treaty implementation.”
The Donald Trump administration has signaled that it would like to replace the expiring New START treaty with a broader arms control pact that constrains China’s nuclear arsenal, and limits deployment of non-strategic nuclear weapons, such as tactical weapons intended primarily for attacking targets on battlefields, and novel weapons such as the nuclear-powered, uncrewed, undersea vehicle Russia has said it is developing.
New START, which went into effect in 2011 during the Barack Obama administration, will expire in 2021, unless the presidents of the U.S. and the Russian Federation agree to a one-time extension of five year. China has said it will not participate in a follow-on treaty.
State also said that the U.S. had complied in 2018 with the restrictions of the now-defunct Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. The U.S. withdrew from the 1987 agreement on Aug. 2, maintaining accusations dating to the Obama administration that Russia violated the agreement beginning in 2008, when Moscow allegedly started developing the since-deployed 9M729.
Both countries are now free to develop and field missiles with a range of about 300 miles to about 3,100 miles.
Jacobs to Buy Wood Group Nuclear Business
Jacobs Engineering announced on Aug. 20 it would pay £250 million ($304.5 million) to acquire the nuclear branch of the Scotland-based John Wood Group.
The deal is expected to be sealed in the first quarter of 2020, pending regulatory approval in the United Kingdom, according to the companies.
The acquisition will bring proprietary technology and nuclear laboratories in the United Kingdom into Jacobs’ Aerospace, Technology, and Nuclear (ATN) business, and a geographic footprint that will help the company expand into regions beyond its U.S. and U.K. bases, executives said during an Aug. 20 conference call with financial analysts.
“This strategic acquisition adds higher-margin technical consulting, enhanced research and development, as well as complementary decommissioning capabilities to our existing Jacobs Tier 1 full life-cycle nuclear business,” Jacobs Chairman and CEO Steve Demetriou said.
The Wood nuclear business employs more than 2,000 workers and is expected to produce $285 million in revenue this year. Its sale will help Wood cut its debt and “take a significant step towards achieving its target leverage policy,” the company said in its own statement.
The Wood Group provides project, engineering, and technical services around the world, with a focus on the energy industry. It has over 60,000 employees in more than 60 nations.
Wood’s operations cover the full nuclear life cycle, including decommissioning and radioactive waste management. In April, it was among six corporate teams selected to compete for more than $500 million worth of decommissioning work at the former Dounreay fast-reactor facility in Scotland. It also holds multiple awards for the Sellafield nuclear processing and cleanup site in Cumbria, including a contract valued at up to $1 billion over two decades for engineering design.
Wood’s nuclear branch does 90% of its business in the United Kingdom, with the remaining 10% split between Western Europe and the rest of the world. Major clients include Sellafield Ltd., the U.K. government-owned manager of the Sellafield site; the United Kingdom’s Atomic Weapons Establishment, London-based power company EDF Energy; and the ITER nuclear fusion research project.
“[W]e felt the strategic value to us was really quite limited, and we think the role of nuclear in energy transition will be quite limited,” Wood CEO Robin Watson said during the company’s Aug. 20 earnings conference call. “Obviously, Jacobs have a different view of it, and it was a transaction. They’ve got a much broader global nuclear business, which maybe fits in their jigsaw differently than ours.”
Jacobs’ nuclear business brings in about $1.2 billion in revenue: $800 million in the United States, from clients including the Department of Energy, Army Corps of Engineers, and Navy; and the remaining $400 million from EDF Energy, Defense Ministry, and other clients in the United Kingdom. Among its projects are decommissioning at Dounreay and cleanup of the radioactively contaminated Shallow Land Disposal Area in Pennsylvania for the Army Corps.
The Dallas-based company has been aggressive in expanding this business, paying more than $3 billion for its 2017 acquisition of CH2M. That made Jacobs, among other things, the owner of an environmental remediation provider for the Department of Energy at the Hanford Site in Washington state and other locations.
Industry sources have said recently Jacobs might also be eyeing some or all of financially troubled rival Fluor, which is the lead or partner in several major Energy Department environmental remediation contracts. One source said last week Jacobs is not necessarily finished with acquisitions.
A Jacobs spokesperson said the company remains open to additional acquisitions, but that it would take a “methodical and disciplined” approach to any deals. The spokesperson did not discuss the company’s potential interest in Fluor.
Together, the Jacobs and Wood nuclear businesses will have about 7,200 employees and revenue of roughly $1.5 billion, according to Jacobs’ Aug. 20 presentation. Roughly 70% of the portfolio will focus on nuclear cleanup, including dismantling or decommissioning of facilities. Twenty percent will involve support for defense nuclear operations and 10% on supporting nuclear power.
