The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) this week announced it approved the start of construction on the decontamination and decommissioning subproject at the Los Alamos Plutonium Pit Production Project.
The effort, approval of which the Exchange Monitor reported in November, involves removing unneeded equipment from the building that will become the lab’s plutonium pit factory. The NNSA plans to produce multiple war-usable pits, the fissile cores of nuclear-weapon primary stages, at Los Alamos by fiscal year 2026.
At the Savannah River Site, personnel notched a few important milestones in the calendar year recently ended, including connecting up a new diesel generator to the H-Area Old Manufacturing Facility, where workers harvest tritium for nuclear weapons. That’s according to a press release sent to media this week.
The generator will keep the old facility resilient in the face of emergencies such as foul weather while the NNSA moves ahead with plans to build a new Tritium Finishing Facility, which is forecast to cost around $500 million and be finished by 2030 or so.
The NNSA this week brushed off a recommendation from the Government Accountability Office that the civilian agency and the Pentagon jointly develop a new risk management process “to periodically identify, analyze, and respond to risks that affect the U.S. nuclear enterprise (including the nuclear weapons stockpile, delivery platforms, and nuclear command and control),” according to a report released Thursday.
In a letter appended to the report, Jill Hruby, the administrator of the NNSA, wrote that the Government Accountability Office’s recommendation “does not fully acknowledge that joint risk management processes are fully in place.” Also, Hruby wrote, because those processes “have proven effective, NNSA considers the recommendation addressed.”
