It will be another year before the National Nuclear Security Administration knows roughly how much it will cost to build the infrastructure to make 80 nuclear-weapon cores annually, the head of the agency told Senators Tuesday.
NNSA Administrator Jill Hruby on Tuesday told the Senate Armed Services subcommittee on strategic forces that initial cost estimates for ramping up pit production to 30 per year at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and at least 50 per year at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina will be available in April 2024. The numbers will be further crunched and an “improved cost estimate” will be ready in 2025, Hruby said.
NNSA wanted to get the pit infrastructure built by 2030 but has said it probably will not be done before the mid 2030s.
Hruby was dinged at Tuesday’s hearing by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MAss.) for not coming to a hearing with cost estimates for ramping up pit production at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
Warren said she had requested this cost estimate in the 2022 edition of Tuesday’s hearing, and reminded Hruby of a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report from January that pegged the entire plutonium pit production enterprise at between $18 billion and $24 billion.
“You didn’t have the numbers last year,” Warren said. “You don’t have the numbers this year and the best answer I can get is we’re going to have them a year from now, which means that Congress and the public has to wait for another year before we even get a basic cost estimate on what this program is going to cost.”
Hruby said the GAO’s cost range was an estimate of the entire two-site modernization and production plan. Many of the subprojects have publicly available cost estimates, but many other construction plans are still in the design phase and difficult to forecast, she said.
“There are many elements to the overall plan and most of those elements have had cost estimates released,” Hruby said. “The lifecycle cost estimate referred to in the GAO report is the total cost for everything involved with making pits. “Some of those are still pretty immature designs and, therefore, it’s very difficult to do the entire cost estimate.”
Earlier this year, the NNSA acknowledged that the Los Alamos pit plant may not have equipment installed to make 30 pits a year until 2030. Senior officials in Washington and at Los Alamos have said they are working on ways to make it happen sooner. Congress mandated that Los Alamos hit 30 pits a year by 2026.