William Bookless, NNSA Principal Deputy Administrator,
speech before the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board, Oct 2, 2019

Timeline:
1:07: "We have three mission spaces that we are responsible for for the nation. The first and largest is [that] we are responsible for the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile -- from birth to death."

4:56: "Just to give you an update from what the Administrator went through in March. We have challenges in three main areas. I already mentioned the stockpile; we're updating the entire U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile as we speak. The Department of Defense is updating the - every delivery system as well as the nuclear command and control systems. Likewise, in the NNSA, we're updating all of the warheads that are associated with those delivery systems over the next 15 years."

5:40: "We also have challenges in personnel. We have 41,000 people, in excess of 41,000 people working on the NNSA mission today."

5:54: "Since March of 2019 we've added more than 4,700 employees in that group of federal employees and labs, plants, and sites. We're going to need to add another 20,000 people by 2025. If you think of that, that's a staggering goal."

6:27: "Los Alamos for instance in the coming year is going to have to hire 2,000 people to have a net increase of 1,200, they'll lose 800 people just due to normal attrition."

6:46: "On the federal side, we only have about 1,800 federal employees that do oversight on this whole program. It's in excess of 15 billion dollars in FY 19. We're going to have to add 400 more in by 2025 to that federal workforce."

7:15: "Currently, 20 percent of our workforce is eligible to retire. By 2025, 40 percent will be eligible to retire."

7:28: "We're living in an infrastructure that began in the Manhattan Project. I mean, we ARE the Manhattan Project legacy. And many of the facilities that were built during the Manhattan Project we are still using. Thirty percent of them date to the Manhattan Project. So, over the next 20 years, we are going to have to go through a major infrastructure modernization process. Currently, we have 30 projects in the critical decision 0, 1, and 2-3 areas."

8:40: "Some of those projects are in excess of 2 billion dollars, some are 25 million. So, they're all over the map in that space."

9:08: "And for many of the things we do there's no industrial base. We are the industrial base for many of the kinds of activities that we engage in. That gives us a unique responsibility and challenge in trying to maintain expertise over multiple generations of people."

9:33: "The U.S. hasn't had a capability of producing plutonium pits, the core of the nuclear primary. We haven't had a capability to produce those in quantity since the Rocky Flats Plant closed in 1989. We've lived on the basis that they were well-built back-in-the-day and they've aged gracefully. However, it's thirty years later. We have to reestablish that capability. And that capability will not come easily."

10:19: "One of the lessons we've learned is that we want resilience in that approach and so we're going with an approach that will build 30 of those pits per year at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and another 50 at the Savannah River Plant. That will -- we expect [it] will -- give us the kind of resiliency that nation deserves in that critical part of our manufacturing need."

10:53: "We're paying the price. In 1995, there was a -- we had begun to experience the desire for a peace dividend from the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The U.S. public was expecting costs to be reduced in the deterrent part of our effort. And there were some important decisions that needed to be made."

11:24: "The U.S. made a strategic decision, it was a conscious decision, to protect the scientific base of our work in order to assure that we could understand the nuclear stockpile as it existed and assure that we could identify concerns that might arise. However, in prioritizing that scientific base we made a conscious decision to let the production capabilities deteriorate and atrophy.  We're paying the price for that now. "

12:08: "All of the infrastructure modernization that I talked to you about, not all, much of it, is in order to reestablish the production that we consciously let go in the since 1995."

12:28: "The total portfolio over the next 30 years for our...to reestablish that production base is in excess of 36 billion dollars."