Staff Reports
NS&D Monitor
10/17/2014
The National Nuclear Security Administration has beefed up federal oversight of the Uranium Processing Facility project in the wake of a space/fit issue that added $540 million to the projected cost of the now-scaled-back facility, the Government Accountability Office said in a report released late last week. The project was criticized for inadequate federal oversight, but the GAO said NNSA has increased federal staffing levels for the UPF project office from nine full-time equivalents in 2012 to more than 50 FTEs in January 2014. “According to NNSA, these additional staff enabled NNSA to conduct more robust oversight of the contractor’s design efforts than was previously possible,” the GAO said, noting that the contractor also took steps to better integrate work from four subcontractors performing design and engineering work on parts of the facility.
The NNSA has decided to scale back the project, moving away from a “big box” approach to a strategy utilizing some existing facilities and construction of smaller buildings. The GAO said that lessons learned from the project and its space/fit issue could be applicable to future NNSA work and applauded an effort by the NNSA to spread the lessons learned across the complex. That included a briefing this summer by the UPF Federal Project Director to other NNSA project management officials. “The sharing of lessons learned is an important element of NNSA’s and DOE’s efforts to better inform and improve their management of other capital acquisition projects,” the GAO said. “Documenting the lessons learned as a result of the UPF space/fit issue may help prevent other costly setbacks from occurring on these other projects.”
NNSA Agrees With GAO Findings
In preparing the report, the GAO staff said they reviewed NNSA and contractor documents, interviewed federal and contractor officials, and “observed the computer model NNSA and the UPF contractor use to track space usage within the facility.” The GAO said there were no new recommendations on the project and, based on the response from NNSA Administrator Frank Klotz, the NNSA generally agreed with the findings. Klotz said the GAO review affirmed the factors that NNSA identified as contributing to the space/fit problem with UPF. In addition to lack of federal oversight, the NNSA also said inadequate design and engineering subcontractor integration played a large part in the issues, as did issues with the organization of the project and inadequate project management controls.
The GAO report noted that “because of the project’s cost increases and schedule delays, NNSA is currently reevaluating its approach to modernizing enriched uranium operations at the Y-12 plant.” However, it doesn’t specifically review the adoption of the recommendations of the Red Team’s evaluation or provide great details on how that’s being carried out.
The report says that early this year NNSA began to consider options other than the UPF because—according to information from Federal Project Director John Eschenberg—“the federal project is facing budget constraints, rising costs and competition from other high-priority projects within NNSA—such as the planned B61 bomb and W78/88 warhead nuclear weapon life extension projects.”
The GAO said that as of July 2014, the NNSA was still evaluating the Red Team’s report, but noted that the proposed solution would require NNSA to construct “two new, smaller facilities to house casting and other processing capabilities”; upgrade existing facilities to house some of the operations now done in the aged 9212 complex; and take other actions, including the consolidation of authority (an apparent reference to newly named Uranium Program Manager Tim Driscoll.