March 17, 2014

WATCHDOG GROUP CALLS FOR END OF CMRR-NF PROJECT

By ExchangeMonitor

A government watchdog group is urging the Obama Administration and Congress to kill one of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s biggest planned construction projects, the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement-Nuclear. Calling the CMRR-NF project planned for Los Alamos National Laboratory a “behemoth of overspending,” the Project on Government Oversight yesterday issued a report urging the Administration to zero out funding for the project over concerns about its ballooning price tag and what it said were questions about its need in the current fiscal and national security environments. “This facility is a poster child for government waste,” POGO Senior Investigator Peter Stockton said in a statement. “Why are we designing a multi-billion dollar facility that has no clear mission?”

While breaking no new ground, POGO’s report ticks off a variety of issues facing the project, including its high cost, project management issues, reductions to the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile, and seismic concerns related to its design. Initially estimated to cost $375 million, the current projected price tag for the project is between $3.7 and $5.8 billion. A firm cost estimate for the project isn’t expected until the end of this year, at the earliest, and Congress recently declined to provide funding for the project to begin preliminary construction activities in Fiscal Year 2012. The facility is expected to be fully operational in 2023.

The facility would replace the lab’s decades-old Chemistry and Metallurgy Research facility, providing space for analytical chemistry and vault space for plutonium storage, which would free up space in the lab’s Plutonium Facility to increase the production of plutonium pits. But POGO suggested that given the current needs of the nation’s nuclear deterrent, it is not necessary to increase pit production, and it suggested that the facility’s planned mission could be performed at other facilities around the weapons complex at a much lower cost. “The fact that CMRR-NF is counter to current nuclear strategy should have been enough to halt design and construction of the facility some time ago,” POGO said in the report. “Now that the U.S. budget is in such dire straits, it only makes sense to cut such an expensive project before more money is wasted.”

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