Acting DOE Nuke Boss Won’t Play Down Pit Costs in Armed Services Hearing

June 25, 2021
By Dan Leone

The acting head of DOE nuclear weapons programs on Thursday passed on a chance to say that a planned plutonium pit factory in South Carolina will cost as much per unit as a cheaper pit factory planned for New Mexico.

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) plans a larger pit factory, the Savannah River Plutonium Production Facility (SRPPF), at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., and a smaller pit factory, the Los Alamos Plutonium Pit Production Plant, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. 

“[T]here’s quite  a bit of consistency between the two,” Charles Verdon, the acting administrator of the NNSA said during a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee. 

“So roughly the square foot costs at [the Savannah River Site] will be equivalent to the cost at Los Alamos?” Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) asked Verdon during Thursday’s hearing.

“It will look a little different,” said Verdon, who testified alongside secretary of energy Jennifer Granholm.

After the hearing, Verdon told press that equating the cost-per-square foot of the two facilities oversimplifies a complicated undertaking. However, he said, the two plants will use some of the same equipment and the cost of equipment and labor at the Los Alamos plant, which is further along in development, helped inform the cost estimate for SRPPF.

SRPPF will cost some $11 billion to build and may not be finished until 2035, NNSA said in June, blowing away the agency’s previous estimate of roughly $4.5 billion by 2030 and dashing hopes of annually producing 80 plutonium pits — intended for the cores of next-generation intercontinental ballistic missile warheads — by the end of the decade.

The Los Alamos Plutonium Pit Production Project in New Mexico, could cost up to $4 billion: $1 billion more than an earlier estimate, but nowhere near the adjustment. [The LANL pit production plant will not be cheaper. LANL is able to hide most of its expansion costs in the "Plutonium Modernization Program." Also, by late 2019, LANL had already completed 7 line item projects and had 3 more in progress (CMRR, TRP III, and TLW) "to enable pit production and the other enduring [Pu] missions at LANL." See p. 19 in the 2019 LANL "Pit Production Plan," obtained in redacted form by FOIA, before LAP4 even began. There are also many other small projects not in LAP4.]

The big difference between the two construction projects, Verdon told Reed Thursday, is that much of the “environmental equipment” needed for habitable buildings already exists in Los Alamos, whereas SRPPF — a facility being built from a partially completed plutonium recycling plant DOE cancelled in 2018 — will need a lot of supporting infrastructure installed.

It is the equipment used for casting pits and analyzing finished pits for manufacturing defects, that will cost roughly the same at SRPPF and Los Alamos, Verdon told Reed. Glove boxes are one example.

SRPPF is notionally to produce 50 pits annually once it switches on while the Los Alamos plant will initially be able to make 30 pits annually. NNSA has said both plants could ramp up operations to handle 80 pits annually on their own [sic -- Hruby and Verdon have testified that LANL could not do so without large additional infrastructure investments (Hruby, 5/27/21 to Sen. Armed Services; Verdon 5/19/21 to Sen. Armed Services and 6/10/21 to House Armed Services], but the agency has not said when either facility might be capable of that flex — only that it will not be by 2030, in time to meet a legal deadline to produce at 80 pits per year.

Nevertheless, Verdon repeated for the Armed Services Committee Thursday that the NNSA still believes a two-state pit complex is the quickest way to hit 80 pits a year and reliably match that throughput into next decade and beyond.

The SRPPF construction-cost estimate of $11 billion, first disclosed publicly by NNSA Administrator-designate Jill Hruby in late May, comes from the facility’s critical decision 1 review. Critical decision 1, or CD-1, is a project management milestone that involves establishing a cost range: one generated by the project itself during a weeks-long review supported by thousands of pages of documents. 

CD-1 is as far as either pit-plant project has gotten so far. The Los Alamos pit plant passed its CD-1 review in April. NNSA headquarters in Washington was scheduled to hold SRPPF’s CD-1 review Thursday in Washington, Verdon told the Monitor after Thursday morning’s hearing.

DOD Will Certify Adequacy of NNSA’s 2022 Budget Request, Granholm Says

Also at Thursday’s hearing, Granholm said that the joint Pentagon-DOE Nuclear Weapons Council, an interagency procurement-oversight group where DOE is represented solely by the NNSA administrator, should soon certify that DOE’s 2022 budget request for the NNSA is adequate to meet military requirements. 

“I think we are in sync and will have a certification,” Granholm told the Senate Armed Services Committee Thursday.

Every year by March 1, the Secretary of Energy is supposed to certify to Congress that the NNSA is on track to hit that deadline. If the Secretary of Energy can’t certify that, the Department of Defense, through the Nuclear Weapons Council, is allowed to tell Congress, by May 1, what parts of DOE should have their budgets cut to funnel more money into construction of the NNSA’s pit enterprise.

In Thursday’s Armed Services hearing, Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) said the deadline to turn in the legally required certification was now July.

During the hearing, Verdon said that greater-than-expected carryover funding from COVID delays to infrastructure projects, plus an expected decrease in construction costs at the Uranium Processing Facility under construction at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., account for the roughly 12% gap between the NNSA’s 2022 nuclear weapons budget request and the 2022 budget the Donald Trump administration’s forecast would be necessary for the upcoming fiscal year.

Overall, the NNSA’s 2022 spending request of roughly $20 billion is about flat compared with the Trump administration’s projection for 2022. 

The NNSA Weapons Activities budget for 2022 would rise to roughly $15.5 billion, under the request, which is about 1% higher than the 2021 appropriation of $15.3 billion, but roughly 12% less than the $15.9 billion the Trump administration thought the account would need in 2022, according to the Future-Years Nuclear Security Program published in NNSA’s 2021 budget request.