On top of the $6.5 billion required to build the Uranium Processing Facility by 2026, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) will have to spend nearly $1 billion to modernize other facilities needed to support the next generation weapon-uranium hub, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
The spending figure comes from an integrated master schedule for the Uranium Processing Facility (UPF) that the agency developed in December, the GAO stated last week in a report.
The UPF and other buildings at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., will produce the uranium-powered secondary stages of nuclear weapons, and assemble the stages.
“NNSA estimated that the uranium program will spend a total of approximately $7.4 billion from fiscal years 2016 through 2026 to support its uranium processing modernization efforts,” the GAO report says. “[T]he life-cycle cost estimate includes $6.5 billion in UPF project costs and over $850 million in program costs that include developing the uranium processing capabilities that are not part of the UPF project.”
Included in the $850 million are the costs of modernizing buildings 9215 and 9204-2E so they can last into the 2040s. The buildings will house capabilities that are either being moved out of Building 9212, the uranium hub the UPF will replace, or which UPF needs to do its job.
In Building 9204-2E, workers assemble enriched uranium components for weapon systems. In Building 9215, workers fabricate parts by machining uranium metal. As Building 9212 shuts down, the NNSA plans to move even more work into building 9215, including uranium purification and processing of scrap uranium.
The NNSA once planned to conduct that work in the UPF itself. However, when the project’s costs started running off the rails earlier in the last decade, the agency decided to keep them in existing buildings as part of a deal with Congress to construct the Uranium Processing Facility itself by 2026 for no more than $6.5 billion.