Publications: Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor

Later this year, the National Nuclear Security Administration will begin a formal review of its program to dispose of the 34 metric tons of plutonium once slated to be recycled into commercial reactor fuel, an agency official said. It was unclear whether the agency would heed the advice of the National Academies of Sciences and […]

Texas-based Fluor, a major contractor at Department of Energy nuclear weapon sites, lost $171 million, or $1.22 per share, for its first quarter that ended March 31, according to results released Thursday. Since late 2019, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice have been investigating problems with Fluor quarterly data filed during […]

A vendor to the Kansas City National Security Campus made thousands of nuclear weapons parts with the incorrect alloy because “product drawings were not clear,” forcing the Pantex Plant to pause servicing on multiple nuclear weapons in mid-September while the National Nuclear Security Administration confirmed the parts were safe to use, a campus spokesperson said […]

This week, top U.S. officials in Washington warned against cutting the U.S. nuclear arsenal or agreeing to extend a nuclear arms control treaty with Russia without assurances that Moscow’s promised warhead freeze would actually happen. “[E]ach piece of our triad is essential, but they’re also complimentary,” Adm. Charles Richard, commander of U.S. Strategic Command, said […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration’s radiation-sniffing helicopter started a campaign of low-altitude flights over Washington this week, part of an effort to safeguard against a nuclear-armed attack on January’s looming presidential inauguration. The agency routinely measures background radiation ahead of large public gatherings to create a base level against which the source of a radiological […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration’s leader should get a fixed term, senior agency managers should be exempted from Senate approval and the stockpile’s steward should strive for a closer contractual relationship with its nuclear-weapons laboratories, a National Academies report concluded. The 14-member, joint National Academy of Public Administration and National Academy of Sciences panel that […]

Here’s this week’s collection of quick-hit news about, and with implications for, U.S. nuclear security. The National Nuclear Security Administration and Canada’s Atomic Energy of Canada Limited have signed a memorandum of understanding to collaborate on nuclear safety and security, the government entities announced jointly. Brent Park, the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) deputy administrator […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration should formalize in April its choice to build a pit-production from the remains of the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina an agency official said recently. That would set the stage for the semiautonomous DOE nuclear weapons agency to approve a formal cost […]

As with the whole country, COVID-19 hit the National Nuclear Security Administration hard this week, when the agency recorded more than 100 new cases, a spokesperson said. For the week ended Friday, 73 contractor and federal employees recovered from their bouts with the disease caused by the novel coronavirus — but the 107 new cases […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration’s enterprise-wide procurement honcho predicted a competition to pick a new management contractor for the Pantex Plant and the Y-12 National Security Complex would conclude in time to replace the incumbent by Oct. 1, 2021, and without any protest. “We don’t get protested,” Bob Raines, the agency’s associate administrator for acquisition […]

Sister Ardeth Platte, the nun who breached the perimeter of the Y-12 National Security Site in 2010 as part of an anti-nuclear protest, died in her sleep last week in Washington at age 84, media reported. Platte, by the time of her death a well-known anti-nuclear-weapons protester, served time in jail for her trespassing — […]

Future nuclear weapons programs will be delayed if the National Nuclear Security Administration is not able to produce depleted-uranium-niobium alloy ingots in Oak Ridge, Tenn., in the next three years, according to a report the Government Accountability Office published this week. “[A]ny delays beyond that will affect the current schedules of these programs,” Congress’ investigative […]

Glovebox component vendor Central Research Laboratories, Red Wing, Minn., again popped up in connection with a glovebox breach at the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s PF-4 Plutonium Facility, this time after a close call involving a plutonium machining operator.  On Sept. 23, an “ergonomic” glovebox glove assembly provided by Central Research Laboratories unexpectedly disconnected from the […]

Touch ‘Em All: NNSA Administrator Rounds Out Tour of Nuclear Security Enterprise With visits this week to the Kansas City National Security Complex in Missouri and a pair of naval nuclear sites in New York, Lisa Gordon Hagerty, administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, wrapped up a four-mouth tour of the civilian agency’s main […]

The Kremlin is open to a one-year extension of the New START nuclear arms control treaty, but not on the terms the White House has proposed, according to a widely translated Russian-language statement from Vladimir Putin, the Russian president. “I have a proposal, namely: to extend the existing Treaty without any conditions for at least […]

It was another week of climbing COVID-19 cases at the National Nuclear Security Administration at deadline Friday, when the agency saw new infections outpace recoveries and leave the civilian nuke steward with 33 active cases. Cases among National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) federal employees and contractors at the eight major sites across the country rose […]

In the second-to-last week of fiscal year 2020, the National Nuclear Security Administration wrapped up its customer requirements review with the Department of Defense for the W87-1 intercontinental ballistic missile warhead, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory said. W87-1, the replacement for W78, is arguably the civilian agency’s most ambitious nuclear modernization project of the 21st […]

A pair of university systems plus just about every major contractor to run the sites in the last decade-plus were among the 49 entities whose representatives toured the Y-12 National Security Site and the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas, last month as part of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s competition to find a new site […]

Personnel at the Pantex Plant will have their dosimetry badges analyzed at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee indefinitely after the Texas assembly facility’s decades-old dosimetry processing equipment finally broke down. Pantex shifted dosimetry processing to Y-12 on a permanent basis at the end of September, and “there are no current plans to restore […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration’s six major management and operations contractors have so far reported about $140 million in reimbursements for paid leave granted to people who could not work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, an agency spokesperson said this week. The tally includes reimbursements claimed from March 27 through Aug. 31 under Section […]

New infections eclipsed recoveries this week across the National Nuclear Security Administration’s labs, plants and sites, where there were 41 more active COVID-19 cases than in the prior week, an agency spokesperson said Friday. The agency discloses only confirmed cases of the disease caused by the novel coronavirus that broke out in Wuhan, China, late […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration should hold a COVID-19-safe virtual meeting to brief New Mexico residents about a planned venting of tritium from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, members of the state’s congressional delegation said Tuesday in a letter to the lab’s local fed. “[W]e strongly urge you to hold an open public information meeting […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration may need to start qualifying the W87 warhead for service aboard Ground Based Strategic Deterrent Missiles in roughly three years, the Air Force’s program director for the next-generation nuke launcher said Thursday. The first test flights for the silo-based missiles that will replace Minuteman III will be in “three years […]

A non-government group using commercial satellite imagery believes it caught the start of structural construction on a new, highly-secure nuclear-weapon storage facility at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming. “A satellite image taken in August and obtained from Maxar shows construction is well underway of the underground [Weapons Generation Facility (WGF)] as well as several […]

For the first time in 15 years, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California is making shipments of transuranic waste to the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, a lab spokesman said this week. Three shipments left Lawrence Livermore for WIPP during the week of Sept. 21, one week after a […]

The former chair of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board used procedural tactics to block board approval of a COVID-19 response plan that complied with federal best practices, the inspector general of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said. The independent federal nuclear health-and-safety watchdog drafted a COVID-19 response plan at the onset of the pandemic, but […]

Federal agencies remained open for business this week, after President Donald Trump signed a stopgap budget bill that freezes most federal budgets at 2020 levels through Dec. 11 — meaning the National Nuclear Security Administration’s nuclear weapons portfolio temporarily has a budget about $3 billion lower than what it requested. The Senate on Wednesday cast […]