Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor Vol. 27 No. 01
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Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor
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January 06, 2023

The year ahead at the NNSA:competition for Pantex; stability at the sites; pits 

By Dan Leone

The National Nuclear Security Administration begins 2023 in search of a new industry partner at the Pantex Plant in Texas and the competition for that contract will be the first since the agency pledged to overhaul the structure of its major site-management accords.

The agency can bake into the new standalone contract to manage the Amarillo, Texas-based nuclear-weapons service depot the sort of changes it wrote about last September in an internal report: longer option terms and a possibly diminished reliance on the parent companies of special-purpose joint ventures created to bid for the right to manage the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) nuclear weapon sites.

The looming competition for Pantex — management of which is being split from the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn. for the first time since 2014 — had not started as of deadline for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor, but NNSA Administrator Jill Hruby affirmed in December that the competition should begin this year.

Going forward, the NNSA is considering five-year base periods and five-year option terms for its major site-management contracts. That would do away with the formerly widespread practice of one-year options that, according to the internal report from the fall, had become a destabilizing distraction for senior site managers who are supposed to be quarterbacking the most demanding series of nuclear-weapon life extensions since the end of the Cold War.

Stability at the sites

With far more of its sites under contract than not last year, the NNSA’s ability to practice what it preached in the fall report, Evolving the Nuclear Security Enterprise, was limited to picking up as many one-year options on existing contracts as it could — something the agency did.

“[T]he one-year contract for award terms were incredibly destabilizing at our labs, plants and sites because they couldn’t keep leadership,” NNSA Administrator Jill Hruby said in December during a webcast forum. “So we acted.”

As a result of that action last year, the primes at Nevada National Security Site, the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico and the Los Alamos National Laboratory all had their contracts maxed out by the NNSA, giving the nuclear security enterprise a far stabler contractual outlook than it had at the beginning of 2022, when each of those contracts was up for renewal and the NNSA’s plans to install a new prime at Pantex and its affiliated site, the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee, were in the early stages of their eventual unraveling.

Now, five major NNSA sites, the Kansas City National Security Complex, Nevada, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos and Sandia, are under contract at least through Oct. 1, 2025, when the agency’s deal with Kansas City prime Honeywell Federal Manufacturing and Technologies was set to expire.

Most of those sites are under contract for longer. As things stood Friday among this group of five, only the NNSA’s contract with a University of California and Bechtel National team at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory had no options beyond 2026.

Of the remaining major NNSA sites, Pantex and Y-12 are under contract with Bechtel-led incumbent Consolidated National Security through 2024 at least. There’s another one-year option at Pantex and as many as three more option years at Y-12, giving the NNSA the possibility of keeping the Tennessee uranium hub under contract until Sept. 30, 2027.

At the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., which will transition to NNSA control around 2025 from the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management, prime contractor Savannah River Nuclear Solutions has options that would keep it on site through Sept. 30, 2027, about nine years before the NNSA has told Congress the agency will open there the larger of two planned plutonium pit production plants.

Pits

With its big extension last year, Triad National Security is under contract at the Los Alamos National Laboratory until Nov. 1, 2028, by which time the team of Battelle, the University of California and Texas A&M University is supposed to preside over production of more than 30 pits annually at the smaller of NNSA’s two planned pit plants.

In 2023 though, the focus is on creating a first-production-unit pit for the primary stage of the planned W87-1 warhead, which is to tip the Air Force’s planned Sentinel series of silo-based intercontinental ballistic missiles: the replacement for the current Minuteman III fleet. A first production unit is a proof of concept article that is disassembled and evaluated by experts to prove that a design is ready for mass production.

The NNSA has been publicly quiet about the timeline for pits at Los Alamos, insisting that it can still cast at least 30 pits there in 2026. However, it came to light last year in an internal lab document that the COVID-19 pandemic had at one point caused almost a year’s worth of delays for the Los Alamos pit program.

In one of the last acts of the unified Democratic government that held power between last week and President Joe Biden’s (D) inauguration about two years ago, Congress ordered the NNSA to draw up a detailed new report on the agency’s plans for pit production, and to turn it over to the Hill by March.

The 2023 National Defense Authorization Act calls on the agency and the chair of the joint DOE-Pentagon Nuclear Weapons Council to review the NNSA’s plans for pit production and report back to Congress this spring about exactly when the agency thinks it can produce at least 80 pits annually — the planned, combined output of Los Alamos and Savannah River once the two are running at full capacity — and whether any alternatives exist to using the lab and Savannah River to do the job.

Also, according to the National Defense Authorization Act, the NNSA has to brief Congress on March 1 about the agency’s progress toward baselining the cost and schedule of the Los Alamos and Savannah River pit plants: a development milestone that DOE calls Critical Decision 2.

In a related requirement, the agency is supposed to brief the House and Senate Armed Services Committees by June “on options for partnering with entities from private industry with expertise in advanced manufacturing and production techniques related to nuclear metallurgy to seek cost efficiencies and mitigate supply chain risks related to the production of plutonium pits, including the production and integration of glove boxes.”

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