Delays to LRSO Warhead Mean Pantex Could Face Production Lull After B61 Work Wraps Up
Todd Jacobson
NS&D Monitor
10/17/2014
The Obama Administration’s decision to delay work on a new long-range standoff (LRSO) weapon for up to three years and defer work on a first interoperable warhead has created a potential production gap at the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Pantex Plant, and it’s unclear whether the issue will be addressed in the Administration’s Fiscal Year 2016 budget request. NNSA weapons program chief Don Cook confirmed the issue in a recent interview with NS&D Monitor, saying it was a “real concern” that warhead production work would be dormant for at least three years in the 2020s under the agency’s current modernization schedule.
The production gap would also affect other NNSA production sites, like the Y-12 National Security Complex, but the issue is most acute at the Pantex Plant, the NNSA’s main production hub where warhead assembly and disassembly takes place. “It’s a budget issue,” Cook said, referring to the large cost of the multi-billion-dollar LRSO program amid other modernization costs. “It’s nothing other than a budget issue. We’ll have a skilled workforce. We already have a skilled workforce that can, through safety authorization, touch and work on any of the warheads in the stockpile or any of the warheads that are slated for dismantlement.”
‘It Takes Money to Pull it Up’
When the Administration rolled out its FY 2015 budget request earlier this year, one of the casualties of fiscal belt-tightening was the LRSO program. At the time, the Administration said it was delaying the First Production Unit for a refurbished warhead for the LRSO by up to three years—to 2027—because of budget concerns, but it said it hoped to narrow the delay to only one year in future budget requests. Because production work on the B61-12 is expected to wrap up in 2024, that leaves a gap of about three years at Pantex, Cook said. “That could be reduced if the ALCM replacement the warhead replacement were pulled up,” he said. “But it takes money to pull it up.”
The decision was criticized at the time, mainly by Republicans, and concerns have lingered as the effect of the decision have unfolded. “Everyone within the system seems to recognize why this delay is a terrible idea: a fragile legacy system coupled with steadily advancing adversary air defense capabilities. Not to mention a problem it creates in the form of a gap in production activities at NNSA,” Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) said last month, noting that the House-passed version of the Fiscal Year 2015 Defense Authorization Act seeks to reduce the delay to the LRSO First Production Unit. “I am hopeful we can contain the LRSO schedule slip to one year,” he said.
Cook: Dismantlements Not an Easy Fix for Production Gap
At Pantex, a mix of production, stockpile surveillance and dismantlement work keeps the plant running at full capacity, but Cook said the gap could not be made up by a temporary increase in dismantlement work. He noted that dismantlement work across the weapons complex was currently ahead of schedule, and increasing dismantlement work to accommodate for the production gap could create a dismantlement gap in the future. “If we dismantle too rapidly, and some people can’t see how that could happen, but it could easily, then we would have a gap in dismantlements,” Cook said.
He also said dismantlement work and refurbishment work requires different training. “It’s actually different training than the training to assemble weapons that are coming off the production line, usually newly manufactured of existing designs, but the dismantlement is dismantlement of old weapons and it’s different training,” he said. “We could certainly turn more of the workforce to dismantlement but because we have already come down quite a bit in weapons numbers already that might then lead to a gap in dismantlement.”
Cook Says Workforce Will be Maintained if Gap Remains
Cook said if the production gap were to remain, the NNSA would look to maintain Pantex’s workforce rather than temporarily cutting it. He said it’s more cost effective to maintain the workforce than go through layoffs because of the amount of training that goes into working with nuclear weapons. “We have to retain a very high level of training first and our safety authorizations are always tied basically to when is the last time somebody did this particular process and if it’s within the last year then generally that’s acceptable but if it was more than a year ago then we have to go through some retraining so the question is really do we save money by reducing the workforce and then retraining and hiring? No we actually don’t,” he said. “In significant part it’s more likely we would try to keep the workforce together.”
