A program-independent review found the cost-floor for building the National Nuclear Security Administration’s planned, multibillion-dollar pit factory at the Los Alamos National Laboratory will be slightly higher than the official estimate, though the ceiling might be a little lower.
The Los Alamos Plutonium Pit Production Project (LAP4) and supporting infrastructure should cost between $2.93 billion and $3.55 billion, according to a cost review conducted by National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) personnel who aren’t part of the LAP4 team.
In a Tuesday email, an NNSA spokesperson declined to share a copy of the independent cost review “[d]ue to sensitive/predecisional information.”
The LAP4 team estimates that the project would cost between $2.7 billion to $3.9 billion to build. That includes not only the cost of expanding and re-equipping Los Alamos’ existing Plutonium Facility 4, where the agency will actually cast pits, but also “all relevant infrastructure, including a training facility and a second security portal for Plutonium Facility 4 to accommodate the increased workforce and construction trade crafts,” the NNSA spokesperson said.
NNSA on Friday announced that LAP4 had hit its Critical Decision 1 milestone: the point in Department of Energy program management where the agency formalizes a conceptual design, officially known as a preferred alternative, and gives the project a cost range — a range that’s narrowed down to a target at Critical Decision 2. For LAP4, the second milestone should arrive in 2023, the NNSA said Friday.
Projects as large as LAP4, one of two planned NNSA pit factories, have to submit to a program-independent cost review before they reach Critical Decision 1, according to a DOE order.
The NNSA planned to start casting pits at LAP4 in 2024, ramping up to 30 annually by 2026. LAP4 won’t be finished until 2027 or 2028, the NNSA said Friday, but “critical equipment is scheduled to be installed in time to achieve the 30 pits per year production capacity in 2026,” according to the agency’s press release.
By 2030, the NNSA hopes to cast a total of 80 pits annually, including the 30 at LAP4, and 50 more at the planned Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility, which is to be built at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., from the remains of the cancelled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility.
The NNSA has said that either factory alone will be able to make 80 pits a year, though the agency’s Plan A is to split the work 30-50 between Los Alamos and the Savannah River Site, for the foreseeable future. In multiple environmental documents, the NNSA has said that the two plants could reach 80 pits a year if they surge capacity. It is not clear how long either plant, as currently envisioned, might be able to sustain such a surge.
“NNSA’s two site approach provides the resilience necessary to reliably produce 80 pits per year,” an agency spokesperson said. “Either facility alone would not provide NNSA with the manufacturing capacity and resiliency needed to reliably meet the Nation’s pit production requirements.”
Meanwhile, the Savannah River pit factory’s team submitted their Critical Decision 1 report to NNSA headquarters earlier this year, an agency spokesperson said in April.
According to one person familiar with the reaction at NNSA headquarters, the cost range for the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility exceeded what some people in Washington expected.
The NNSA should release its cost estimate for the Savannah River pit plant in “mid-May or early June,” the head of the Savannah River Site’s management and operations contractor predicted in March.
All of the new pits the NNSA will cast at Los Alamos and Savannah River will initially be for W87-1 warheads, which are slated for use aboard the silo-based, Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent intercontinental ballistic missiles scheduled to replace Minuteman III missiles starting in 2030.
W87-1 will be a fresh copy of the W78s used on the Minuteman III fleet. However, the first of the next-generation missiles will use W87-0 warheads: another Minuteman III tip that will have to be qualified for use on the replacement missiles in the next several years.
Editor’s note, 05/05/2021, 2:52 p.m. Eastern time: the story was updated to clarify that each plant has a planned surge capacity of 80 pits annually.