ARLINGTON, VA -The Department of Energy’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and its contractors must modernize key infrastructure quickly, a Kiewit Nuclear executive said here Monday.
“We are at an inflection point,” Mike Rinehart, president of Kiewit Nuclear Solutions, told Exchange Monitor’s annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit Monday afternoon. “The nuclear security enterprise is expected to modernize at a speed and scale that is unprecedented in recent history.”
The demands of increased plutonium pit production, planned uranium enrichment and parts manufacturing “are accelerating at the same time,” Rinehart said. This is occurring while much of the DOE nuclear infrastructure is “aging out” because it was built more than a half century ago.
Afterward, Rinehart said Kiewit is not really new to the nuclear complex, having helped build DOE’s Portsmouth Site in the 1950s.
At the same time, this infrastructure upgrade must come without cutting corners on safety, increasing innovation and efficiency, Rinehart said. Due to international security threats, the DOE-NNSA and its contractors cannot assume “that time is on our side.”
Kiewit’s nuclear infrastructure history goes back to the construction of the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in the 1950s, Rinehart said after the presentation. Over the decades, the Omaha-based construction company got more involved with projects like natural gas-fueled power plants.
But over the last 15 years or so, Kiewit has again become increasingly involved in nuclear work at sites such as the Idaho National Laboratory and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, Rinehart said.
Kiewit and the rest of the contractor community must deliver, Rinehart said. This means “making stuff happen”, from moving earth to installing cables and “commissioning facilities.”