Officials from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will be in New Ellenton, S.C., on April 18 to discuss the agency’s latest performance evaluation of the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility being built at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site.
The regulator gave a positive review of 2016 operations at the plant intended to process 34 metric tons of excess nuclear weapon-capable plutonium for use as commercial nuclear reactor fuel.
Site construction and operations contractor CB&I AREVA MOX Services earned strong marks for its construction program and oversight from Jan. 1 to Dec. 31, 2016. Specifically, NRC officials determined that “construction activities were consistent with NRC rules and regulations as well as the conditions of the MOX construction authorization,” according to an agency press release Monday.
The findings stood in contrast to the National Nuclear Security Administration’s fiscal 2016 performance evaluation for the contractor, which received a “satisfactory” rating and just 8.9 percent of its possible award fee, $267,000 of the $3 million that was available for the budget year ended Sept. 30. CB&I AREVA MOX Services fired back that the NNSA scorecard reflected the agency’s ongoing efforts to terminate the project in favor of an alternative plutonium disposal method.
The NRC did note Monday that it would conduct a follow-up inspection after identifying a Severity Level III violation connected to CB&I AREVA’s acquisition of certain safety-related gear.
The NRC open house is scheduled for one hour beginning at 6 p.m. at the Garden Conference Room of the Applied Research Center, 301 Gateway Drive in New Ellenton. Agency staffers will not provide an official presentation, but will answer questions regarding the NRC’s oversight of the MOX plant.
The National Nuclear Security Administration said Thursday it joined with the U.S. Air Force to conduct a non-nuclear flight test of the B61-12 gravity bomb last month.
The test, conducted at the Tonopah Test Range in Nevada, was intended to assess the bomb’s non-nuclear functions and the F-16 aircraft’s ability to deliver the weapon to ensure its baseline design would meet military requirements, the NNSA said. It represented the first of several tests to be conducted over the next three years to qualify the B61-12 for service, following three development flight tests held in 2015.
The B61-12 program is intended to extend the life of the B61 gravity bomb for 20 years at a cost of roughly $8.1 billion, with its first production unit scheduled to be delivered by March 2020 and production scheduled to finish by 2024. The weapon is a consolidation – through modifications and replacement of aging components – of four versions of the B61 nuclear bomb, which is deployed at several bases in Europe as part of the U.S. commitment to its NATO allies.
The New Mexico-based Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories designed the hardware used in the latest flight test, and Boeing designed the tail-kit assembly section.
Sandia said in its own news release that tracking telescopes, remote cameras, and other instruments during the test collected information on the weapon’s performance. “For months, teams will be analyzing a wealth of data they collected from this first of a qualification test series planned over the next three years,” Sandia said.
The NNSA said last August it had approved the production engineering phase of the life-extension program, marking its entry into the final development phase before production.
The Department of Energy will soon solicit support for its Office of Enterprise Assessments’ National Training Center (NTC) in New Mexico, according to a preliminary notice posted last week.
The upcoming solicitation will seek support for security and safety training, as well as cybersecurity and information technology activities, at the NTC located on Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, N.M., as well as at DOE headquarters in Washington, D.C.
The NTC hosts standardized health, safety, safeguards, security, and protective force training for DOE and National Nuclear Security Administration federal and contractor employees.
DOE plans to make a single five-year indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract award with firm-fixed-price and time and materials task orders, the notice said. A draft statement of objectives will be posted on fedbizopps.gov within 10 days.
The DOE has tentatively scheduled a site visit to the NTC on May 18. Those interested in attending must submit a statement of interest by email to Bari Brooks at [email protected] by 3 p.m. April 24.
The complete solicitation will be available on the website by late May, at which time interested bidders may submit their proposals within an anticipated 50 days from the date of the request.
The National Nuclear Security Administration will extend for three months its contract with TechSource for technical support to the agency’s Office of Systems Engineering and Integration, according to another notice posted last week.
The contract requires technical support for development of integrated master schedules for the NNSA’s management and operations contractors’ schedules to reflect program milestones; updating the agency’s defense programs integrated master schedule; implementing earned value management systems; and developing schedule and cost-risk contingency analyses, among other work.
The NNSA requires its sites to use an earned value management system to coordinate schedules and work performed, with the intent of keeping programs on schedule and within cost.
The contract modification will extend TechSource’s period of performance until June 17 at an estimated value of $496,744.59. The total value of the task order, excluding the extension, is $6.6 million. The notice said the NNSA intends to initiate a competition for the follow-on requirement to the task order for these services.
The Los Alamos, N.M.-based science and engineering consulting firm in March received a two-month extension of its task order for technical support services for the NNSA’s Office of Advanced Simulation and Computing and Institutional R&D Programs.
From The Wires
From The American Interest: Former Defense Secretary Ashton Carter weighs in on U.S. nuclear deterrent modernization.
From Defense One: 3D printing of U.S. ICBM components.
From the Brookings Institution: The major debates taking place at the U.N. negotiations on the global nuclear weapons ban.
