At the prodding of a senior U.S. senator, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is working on a “thorough review” of its primary plutonium-pit production facility at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, a spokesman for the semiautonomous Energy Department agency said Tuesday.
In early August, Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) — after reading a damning critique reported by the Center for Public Integrity and published in the Washington Post and other news outlets — asked the National Nuclear Security Administration for an update on the the laboratory’s Plutonium Facility (PF-4).
McCaskill, ranking member on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, asked for a reply by Aug. 24. Neither the committee nor the NNSA would confirm whether the stockpile steward had responded to the lawmaker.
However, “NNSA is engaged with Congress and will continue to keep them informed as we complete a thorough review on this matter,” agency spokesman Greg Wolf told Weapons Complex Morning Briefing by email Wednesday
Wolf did not provide a timeline for completing that review.
It is unclear whether the assessment will cover all the ground McCaskill asked NNSA to explore. Among other things, she asked the agency to grade its own oversight of PF-4, which reopened in October 2016 after a roughly three-year closure following well-publicized violations of criticality safety rules.
McCaskill also wanted to know how much of the roughly 7-percent year-over-year budget increase the Donald Trump administration requested for NNSA for fiscal 2018 “will be dedicated to improve safety standards” at defense nuclear facilities such as PF-4.
McCaskill further demanded a vote of confidence from NNSA in its management contractor at Los Alamos, the University of California and Bechtel National-led Los Alamos National Security, and asked the agency whether the contractor had borne the costs of the PF-4 shutdown.
