The National Nuclear Security Administration’s nuclear production complex awakens in earnest from a post-Cold War slumber in the 2020s, and the agency has a year of stable funding to launch a decade in which a major foreign policy decision could change the tack of the ongoing U.S. nuclear modernization program.
It is, of course, a presidential election year, and the New Start nuclear arms control treaty between the U.S. and Russia — hard caps of 1,550 deployed, strategic nuclear weapons per country — could well be touched by it. Set to expire in early February 2021, the treaty could be renewed by President Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, president of Russia, for another five years beyond that.
The Trump administration prefers a replacement treaty that limits other Russia weapons, and which would also constrain the smaller nuclear arsenal of China. The Chinese foreign ministry has said clearly that it wants no part of such a treaty, but the White House has so far clung to hope of bringing China into the fold.
If it is anyone’s guess whether the lure of an easy deal to tout on the campaign trail will tempt Trump to accede to a New Start extension, it is clear to all that eliminating the New Start hard caps would at least open the door to tweaking the U.S. arsenal in ways presently not allowed.
So, there’s one big-picture item to watch. It’s above nearly everybody’s pay grade, and the answer won’t really change the course of the nuclear security enterprise in the next 12 months, anyway.
On the other hand, the nuclear modernization program started in 2016 by the Barack Obama administration — a trade of sorts for getting New Start through a wary GOP Senate, and still among the biggest nuclear-policy markers of the 21st century — rolls on.
To stick with an analogy that’s still relatively fresh in everyone’s heads, the modernized weapons that one day will be carried by the interservice multitudes of U.S. Strategic Command are like the stuff some of us found under the tree weeks ago: spit-shined, wrapped up in a bow, and, in plenty of cases, batteries included.
In the meanwhile, the NNSA is doing what the white vans and brown trucks were doing a month ago: scrambling like mad to make sure the big day goes off without a hitch.
Here, in no special order, is a non-exhaustive list of the nuclear-security milestones the agency is aiming to deliver in 2020:
- Hosting an industry day for the next-generation Lithium Production Facility, to be built at the Y-12 National Security Complex under contract to the Bechtel-led Consolidated Nuclear Security. Scheduled for later this month, it’s practically ringing in the New Year. For now, the prime is only requesting information for the potential subcontract: among other things, whether it should be design-build or design-bid, according to a note posted just before Christmas. Lithium is an essential ingredient for tritium: the radioactive hydrogen isotope that boosts the yield of thermonuclear weapons, and which decays rapidly enough that any nuclear power must constantly produce more of it for as long as it wishes to remain a nuclear power.
- Producing tritium in a second civilian nuclear reactor. November 2020 is the notional target for this milestone, and a lot of the paperwork is out of the way. In May, the Tennessee Valley Authority secured a license amendment from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to irradiate NNSA-made tritium producing burnable absorber rods in Watts Bar Unit 2. Unit 1 already irradiates such rods, made under contract to the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and Unit 2 is slated to irradiate more than 1,000 rods during its fourth fueling cycle. With four weapons modernization programs in various stages of progress, the agency will need a steady supply of tritium, the radioactive hydrogen isotope, to maintain the destructive potency of refurbished warheads and bombs.
- Selecting a preferred technology for the next-generation defense-uranium enrichment capability. This was supposed to happen in December 2019, now it’s supposed to go down in “mid- to late-FY2020,” an NNSA spokesperson told Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor on Thursday. The decision could be big news for Centrus Energy Corp., which owns one of the two technologies in the running to refine low-enriched uranium for tritium production in the 2040s. The other option is a publicly developed technology owned by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
- Expanding Nevada National Security Site’s underground subcritical testing complex. The NNSA was set to U1a Complex Enhancements Project around March, setting cost and schedule bounds for the underground buildout of new subcritical laboratories that will support NNSA’s modernization regimine for the W87-1 intercontinental ballistic missile warhead, and the W80-4 cruise missile warhead. Mining out the new underground workspace will take three to five years, according to estimates the site’s Honeywell-led prime, Mission Support and Test Services.
- Finalizing the contract situation at the Savannah River Site. For the most part, the DOE has figured this out. The agency’s Environmental Management office will still own all the Savannah River contracts, as it does now. The NNSA will, presumably, continue to pass money through those contracts for its tritium and plutonium missions at the former plutonium refinery. DOE tentatively plans to split management of the Savannah River National Laboratory, which contributes research to the NNSA missions, into a separate contract. The lab now is managed under the Savannah River Site management contract held by the Fluor-led Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS), which is on the job until at least Sept. 30. DOE has options for two additional years. Responses are due February to a request for information on the potential new lab contract. One source expected a mid-year solicitation.
- Figuring out the contracting approach for turning the partially built Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, a plutonium recycling plant, into the pit factory the NNSA calls the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility. The work is one of the biggest NNSA plums available to industry in the near term, and also thought to be a tricky project to pull off. Last year, a Savannah River Nuclear Solutions Executive said the company will help hone the NNSA procurement approach for the project around September 2020. It will be a “unique challenge,” Douglas Dearolph, vice president of independent performance assurance at SRNS partner Huntington Ingalls Industries, said in early 2019 at the ExchangeMonitor’s annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit. “This will not be easy and if not done precisely will erode the actual benefit of having inherited a partially constructed structure.”
- The downstream effect of technical delays on the B61-12 gravity bomb and W88 Alt 370 submarine-launched ballistic-missile warhead refurbishments. In 2019, the NNSA acknowledged that these programs would be delayed because some commercial-off-the-shelf capacitors were unsuitable for use in the tuned-up weapons. The first production unit of the W88 Alt 370 warhead might still arrive in 2020, but the B61-12 first production unit will not arrive until 2021, at least. To keep the programs from heading any further off the rails, the NNSA plans to shift near-term money from the W87-1 intercontinental ballistic-missile warhead program and the W80-4 cruise-missile warhead refurbishment into B61-12 and W88 Alt 370. The agency’s fiscal year 2021 budget request, notionally due in February, could shed some light on exactly how much.
