Kansas City East to Begin Nuke-Part Manufacturing by Early 2021, M&O Boss Says

ALEXANDRIA, Va. —The Kansas City National Security Campus will begin light manufacturing of nuclear-weapon components at its new Kansas City East satellite plant “late this year [or] early next year,” the head of the site’s management and operations contractor said here Wednesday.

“But we’re going to be fully functional in about two or three years,” John Ricciardelli, president of Honeywell Federal Manufacturing & Technologies, said Wednesday in a question-and-answer session at the ExchangeMonitor’s annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit. “There’s a series of 16 different projects associated with moving in and making that building capable.”

The 275,000-square-foot Kansas City East, or Building 23, was leased by the contractor on Oct. 1. Honeywell Federal will eventually relocate 500 workers to the facility, which among other things will handle plastic molding, testing of electrical components, and parts fabrication, according to a National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) environmental review.

For now, Building 23 is used mostly for storage, Ricciardelli said. That at least frees up space at the main manufacturing complex, which is about 1 mile by road from the satellite facility.

The Kansas City National Security Campus, the NNSA’s manufacturing hub for non-nuclear weapons parts, is expanding its shop floor by leasing space near the main campus in Missouri. The expansion coincides with the agency’s drive to push out first production units, and begin subsequent manufacturng runs, of four major nuclear weapon refurbishments this decade. 

So far, the facility is feeling the crunch. In Honeywell Federal’s performance review for fiscal 2019, the NNSA warned that “[m]ultiple weapon program components are not on track to meet full rate production requirements” at the Kansas City plant. Those are in addition to the commercial off-the-shelf capacitors that the NNSA last year declared unsuitable for use in the B61-12 gravity bomb and W88 Alt-370 submarine warhead. The first production units of each weapon now will be delayed more than a year each. The Kansas City plant procured the capacitors.

In addition, the NNSA warned in the evaluation, Honeywell Federal “struggled to adequately plan and acquire additional space to support the growing weapons workload.”

Here at the summit, an NNSA official said the agency is monitoring the Kansas City prime closely as its 1.5-million-square-foot non-nuclear shop — downsized significantly from the old Bannister complex — prepares for the biggest weapons production run since the end of the Cold War.

“We’re trying to support Kansas City’s efforts to secure additional lease space to support their growing workload,” Michael Thompson, the NNSA’s assistant deputy administrator for major modernization programs at headquarters in Washington, said in a panel discussion after Ricciardelli. “We have full support for their plan they’ve put together [and] [w]e’re looking in parallel at a study to determine how best to position ourselves for what comes next.”

Thompson described his as a “new office,” that is taking “really more of a holistic look at the whole portfolio.”