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For immediate release January 12, 2023. See also yesterday's press release.
Contact: Greg Mello, 505-265-1200 office, 505-577-8563 cell
Permalink * Prior press releases
Additional references available upon request; see also these pages
Albuquerque, NM -- The Government Accountability Office's (GAO's) year-long 78-page review of the National Nuclear Security Administration's (NNSA's) program to reconstitute U.S. production of plutonium warhead cores ("pits") highlights the program's lack of some basic management elements, such as detailed budgets, life-cycle cost estimates, and schedules linked to program requirements and milestones.
The absence of these elements increases "the likelihood of disruption and delay," according to GAO.
By way of background, each nuclear warhead or bomb contains one pit, usually but not always of a type specific to that weapon. Unless a reusable pit of an appropriate type is available, each new warhead requires a new pit. Pit production ceased in the U.S. in 1989, with the exception of 30 pits built at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) over the 2007-2011 period.
NNSA's current plans are to produce pits at two main sites: Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), which is to produce at least 30 ppy; and the Savannah River Site (SRS), which is to produce at least 50 ppy.
Tallying only program elements for which funding has been requested or costs estimated in NNSA's budget requests, GAO concludes that the cost of starting up pit production at the required rate of 80 pits per year (ppy) could exceed $18 to $24 billion (B). In its estimate GAO did not include post-startup operational costs, or the cost of support functions not included in NNSA's pit production budget requests, which is a particular accounting problem at LANL. GAO also does not include the other capital projects NNSA has said will be needed to support pit production at LANL, some of which are large projects. No cost estimates for these projects are available.
Without life-cycle costs it is impossible to know the price of the pits to be produced. Given the unbounded scope of work at LANL in particular as various legacy facilities currently supporting pit production are successively replaced on an as-yet-unknown schedule, no life-cycle cost can be computed. By contrast, as GAO points out (Figure 11, p. 70), SRS pit production will depend primarily on a single capital asset project.
Study Group director Greg Mello:
GAO's excessively polite and euphemistic report leaves it to the reader to conclude that NNSA's sprawling pit production program, the largest nuclear warhead endeavor since the Cold War, has already come off the rails. Where, how, and how badly it will crash is not yet clear.
We know it will crash at LANL. That is happening already (updated here). Whether it will also crash at SRS is not yet clear.
At LANL, pit production deadlines -- 1 this year, 10 next year, 20 in 2025, 30 in 2026 -- won't be met on time, as this report quietly notes. As to costs, what NNSA said would be "$3 billion" (slide 2) is now at least $12 billion (counting FY19-28 only, here).
The pit production facility at SRS was also under-scoped and has doubled in cost. Already in 2017 NNSA understood that project could take up to 2036 to come on line (slide 9). That is now the soonest NNSA believes full production can start there (p. 99).
NNSA started two plutonium "megaprojects" with what this report describes as, in so many words, a deeply-flawed management structure. Now NNSA is cutting every management corner to maintain the illusion that this program is on track. It's not.
Not having "a comprehensive schedule or cost estimate" is a fancy way of saying NNSA does not know what it is doing and has little likelihood of success.
How can NNSA produce the required number of pits on schedule or on budget, when NNSA has no comprehensive schedule or budget? These are elementary, normal components in any program or project. After more than two decades of preparation, NNSA's pit production program still doesn't have them. Of note, the DOE Inspector General dinged NNSA for its lack of a detailed schedule for pit production way back in 2002, twenty years ago.
What GAO describes is really a "blank check" process that does not even have a defined scope of work. It's open-ended. This program sprawls across multiple sites, multiple bureaucracies, and dozens if not hundreds of contractors, subcontractors, and suppliers. "Just give us the money," NNSA says on behalf of these hungry contractors and the pork-barrel politicians who hold the whip. In simple terms, NNSA's contractors have captured the government.
The fewer cost estimates and schedules NNSA provides, the fewer cost estimates and schedules NNSA and its contractors will exceed.
While the costs GAO tabulates are shocking enough, they do not encompass the rolling wave of large capital projects that NNSA has already said will be needed at LANL in particular to support pit production in the short, medium, and longer term. Key LANL nuclear facilities are aging out. NNSA and LANL aren't telling Congress this. They will send the bill to the taxpayers later. GAO is saying it would be better to see all the costs up front, please.
NNSA sees things differently. As the agency recently said, their fiscal environment is no longer "cost-constrained" (p. 3).
Up to now, no administration has been clear, even to itself, about the true goals of this program. What's the mission? What are these pits for? There's a crash program, a frantic program, to build as many pits at LANL as is physically possible, in the shortest possible timeframe, using round-the-clock-work and thousands of additional production and support workers. Why? Why are new pits needed in the 2020s and early 2030s? Why can't existing pits, or existing warheads, be used? No convincing answer has been offered. Apparently, LANL production is needed to be able to put multiple warheads on a new land-based missile. Why is that an important option to create, since the U.S. does not deploy multiple warheads on land-based missiles today? Why would that make Americans safer?
And what is the cost of that, not just in dollars but in the risk to other NNSA programs, and other priorities in this society? This is a mission that needs to be widely debated in Congress, not just discussed, often behind closed doors, in the two congressional defense committees -- if indeed it is discussed in Congress at all.
The cost of the pits to be produced at LANL will be staggering -- too great to use in any warhead program without blowing the budget sky-high, far beyond anything ever seen up to now. Up to now, LANL and its congressional representatives have been able to get away with saying, "Oh, we need this project anyway, so the additional cost of using it for such-and-such a program is zero!" But when the cost of a new capability reaches north of $10 billion, as it does in the case of LANL pit production at LANL, that house of cards collapses. Will anybody believe the circular argument that pits cost nothing because we had to build a $10 billion pit factory anyway? I don't think so.
Sooner or later, as the reality of these costs, this complexity, and these delays sink in, all of which will get worse over time, DoD and Congress are going to reach in and simplify this program. Rationalize it. That bodes ill for LANL's jerry-rigged pit project, which does not meet modern safety standards and will not hold up over time. NNSA knew this once. In June of 2017, NNSA issued an order (pp. 2, 47-48) that LANL's main plutonium facility should not be used for permanent pit production -- as is unfortunately now the plan. Sooner or later that wisdom will be remembered.
***ENDS***
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