The National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) B61-12 life-extension program management faces some issues with scheduling, risk mitigation, quality assurance, and reserve funding, the Department of Energy’s Inspector General’s Office (IG) found in a report released Tuesday.
The report offered a number of recommendations to address the issues; the NNSA said some have already been resolved, while work on others is ongoing.
The B61-12 program is intended to extend the life of the B61 gravity bomb for 20 years at an estimated cost of $8.1 billion, with its first production unit scheduled for delivery by March 2020. The Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories conduct most of the design work for the refurbishment program for the B61, which is part of the United States’ extended deterrent for its NATO allies.
The B61-12 program is the first to incorporate the NNSA’s new approach to life-extension program management. The agency has required its sites to use an earned value management system to coordinate the schedules and work performed under the program in order to keep it on schedule and within cost.
The IG found several areas for program management improvement, however. These include scheduling issues, such as misalignment between the master and site schedules. Another issue involved risk mitigation deficiencies; for instance, some risks were not assigned specific mitigation actions. In another example, half of the risk mitigation actions in the program’s risk database for Sandia and Los Alamos were behind schedule.
The IG also found quality assurance deficiencies and a lack of justification about whether program sites had enough reserve funds to address program risks and uncertain costs that could occur.
The IG recommended the NNSA administrator ensure the life-extension program better aligns its master and site schedules, includes risk mitigation actions into the site schedules, incorporates unresolved issues into the design process for both nuclear and non-nuclear components, and factors reserve funds into cost estimates. NNSA defense programs should complete program management procedure development for its weapon systems, it also said.
The NNSA agreed with the recommendations and said corrective actions have been either completed or planned to address the issues, but added that the report “understated the significant accomplishments and increased management effectiveness associated with the B61-12 LEP.” Management’s letter noted that corrective actions will be completed by the end of fiscal 2016.
