Publications: Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor

A planned pit factory to be built at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., might take five years longer than the National Nuclear Security Administration wanted to produce its full load of war-ready nuclear weapon cores, the Joe Biden administration’s nominee to lead the agency said Thursday. A slip at Savannah River, one of […]

Los Alamos National Laboratory has hired enough criticality safety personnel to support planned manufacturing of nuclear-weapon cores at the New Mexico laboratory, but staff churn among these crucial workers is more common than the lab believes, a new DOE review said. Lab management and operations contractor Triad National Security “has adequately managed the training and […]

Without much Republican support, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this week favorably reported the Joe Biden administration’s nominee for the State Department’s top arms control post to the Senate floor. The Tuesday vote in the evenly divided committee was 12-10 on Bonnie Jenkins’ nomination for under secretary of state for arms control and international security. […]

Once again, the Congressional Budget Office’s biennial cost estimate for the 10 years of nuclear modernization spending arrived just in time for the yearly federal budget debate on Capitol Hill. The latest congressionally mandated report from the non-partisan office covers planned spending from 2021 through 2030, during which Pentagon and Department of Energy programs are […]

The Savannah River Site in February completed upgrades to tritium processing facilities at the site’s H-Area that will allow personnel to fill tritium reservoirs for the planned B61-12 nuclear gravity bomb life-extension program, the site said Tuesday. The upgrades doubled the capacity of one of the site’s tritium lines capacity, according to a press release, […]

National Engineering and Technology Solutions of Sandia, the Honeywell-owned prime for the Sandia National Laboratories, agreed to a $152,000 settlement with the Department of Energy over the unauthorized disclosure of classified information at the lab some time around 2019. The fine was not the only penalty Sandia paid, but other details of the enforcement were […]

A regional group to promote communities around the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico has decided to close up shop. “We are looking toward officially dissolving by June 30,” Darien Fernandez, the Taos Town Council member and chair of the Regional Coalition  of LANL [Los Alamos National Laboratory] Communities, said by […]

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management plans to relocate some transuranic waste from the Nevada National Security Site to the Idaho National Laboratory where it will be prepared for eventual shipment to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. The transuranic material is what “we refer to as the Nevada spheres,” Robert […]

As part of a roughly $20 billion 2022 budget request for the National Nuclear Security Administration, the Joe Biden administration on Friday sought about 12% less for civilian nuclear weapons programs than the Donald Trump administration forecast would be necessary for the coming fiscal year. Overall, the 2022 spending request for the National Nuclear Security […]

Confirmed active cases of COVID-19 were well below the one-month acreage across the National Nuclear Security Administration’s federal and contractor workforce this week, falling to 87, or about 40% lower than a month ago, the agency said Friday. Although that’s over four times as many active cases as the civilian nuclear weapon steward reported heading […]

A three-day New Mexico Environment Department hearing on the need for a new underground shaft for the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant kicked off this week with a lawyer for DOE saying the case is not about a life extension for the transuranic waste disposal site. The hearing is about efforts to “restore […]

In a budget hearing that was mostly a best-of, a couple Senators asked the acting head of the National Nuclear Security Administration about alternative means of meeting the mission objectives of the day, including by producing pits at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory or buying, instead of enriching, uranium needed to produce weapons-tritium in the […]

Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.), a reliable vote against the nuclear-modernization status quo in the House Armed Services Committee, told disarmament advocates this week that the Joe Biden administration should pause development of the next U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile. It was one of two steps Garamendi said Biden should take as part of the administration’s nuclear […]

Bechtel, Reston, Va., and Fluor, Irving, Texas, are leading separate bids for the potentially $10-year, $21.5 billion management and operations contract for the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site, people familiar with the competitive landscape said this week. Amentum, Germantown, Md., is also in the mix as a partner, one of these people said. The […]

The planned Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility will wrap up its critical decision 1 review in “mid-June,” the acting administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration told Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor this week. Acting Administrator Charles Verdon fine-tuned the date of the big milestone for the planned plutonium pit factory in the halls of […]

COVID vaccination levels climbed at the Sandia National Laboratories this week and appeared to be headed toward a plateau at National Nuclear Security Administration production sites and the Nevada National Security Site, according to agency data. Across the agency’s federal and contractor workforce, confirmed active cases of COVID-19 — the viral disease caused by the […]

As of Friday, with only weeks to go before it hoped to transition the sites to new management, the National Nuclear Security Administration had yet to hold discussions with bidders for the next contract to manage the Pantex Plant and the Y-12 National Security Complex, sources said. The new contract has a four-month transition period […]

The Department of Energy is picking up its option to keep Centerra Group on through at least Oct. 7 as provider of security at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina while the agency continues to review a 10-year, $1-billion follow-on contract awarded in February to Securitas CIS. A DOE spokesperson said in an email late last […]

Ex-Sandia National Laboratories employee Joshua Cordova has pleaded guilty to four counts of fraud and now awaits a sentencing in the U.S. District Court for New Mexico after allegedly ripping off the government for somewhere between $75,000 and $140,000, according to a plea agreement filed last week. Cordova, who helped train military, law-enforcement and emergency […]

A swap of common shares for preferred shares led to a $2.2-million first-quarter loss for Centrus Energy Corp.’s  common shareholders, as revenue rose across the board, the Bethesda, Md.-based nuclear fuel reseller and enrichment technology developer wrote in its latest quarterly earnings report. Centrus’ net income was $5.1 million for the three months ended March […]

Early in-person voting started last week and runs through May 29, for the June 1 special election in New Mexico’s Congressional District 1, which is home to the Sandia National Laboratories. The seat was vacated by Rep. Debra Haaland (D), she was confirmed as the Joe Biden administration’s secretary of interior on March 16. The special election […]

The Joe Biden administration will start its nuclear posture review soon and work on it into the fall, there’s no new Minuteman III life-extension study at the Pentagon and bad welds on some missile tubes won’t delay delivery of the first Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine, witnesses testified late Wednesday before a Senate Armed Services panel. […]

In a week where the federal government said people fully vaccinated against COVID-19 can safely return to some forms of maskless, pre-pandemic socializing, active cases of the viral disease fell across the National Nuclear Security Administration complex as vaccinations rose. The agency reported 138 active cases of COVID-19 among its civilians and contractors on Friday, […]

Fluor, Irving, Texas, suffered a net loss from continuing operations of $61 million compared with a net gain of $21.6 million during the first quarter of 2020, the international engineering and construction company said Friday. A $68-million expense linked to development of its NuScale small modular reactor business, and other costs, contributed to the slide, […]

During a nearly three-hour budget hearing into which nuclear weapons seldom figured, Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said Thursday she supports building a two-state complex to produce at least 80 plutonium pits annually.  That’s among the most, if not the most, definitive statement of support any senior Biden-administration official has made for the National Nuclear […]

An unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile was unable to conduct a planned test launch from Vandenberg AFB, Calif. on May 5th. “The unarmed missile in test configuration reacted exactly as it was designed, terminating the launch on the ground when it detected a fault in its launch sequence,” U.S. Air Force Global Strike Command […]

A program-independent review found the cost-floor for building the National Nuclear Security Administration’s planned, multibillion-dollar pit factory at the Los Alamos National Laboratory will be slightly higher than the official estimate, though the ceiling might be a little lower. The Los Alamos Plutonium Pit Production Project (LAP4) and supporting infrastructure should cost between $2.93 billion […]