KNOXVILLE – More than half of the employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Production Office, which encompasses both the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee and the Pantex Plant in Texas, have been working for the nuclear enterprise for less than five years, according to agency and contractor officials.
There are about 12,000 employees between the two sites, jointly managed on behalf of the NNSA by Consolidated Nuclear Security (CNS). Of those, more than 50 percent of the federal workforce and 61 percent of CNS employees have worked there for less than five years, said Teresa Robbins, manager of the NNSA Production Office.
That lack of experience presents a challenge for the two major nuclear weapon manufacturing facilities, although it also is presenting an opportunity to build a specialized workforce from scratch as they gear up for the largest nuke modernization effort since the Cold War, Robbins said.
“It definitely creates an opportunity and we are actually seeing this as an opportunity,” Robbins said at the Energy, Technology and Environmental Business Association’s Business Opportunities and Technical Conference here. “From a safety culture perspective, we see this as an opportunity to onboard the next generation workforce in an intentional manner so in hopes they’ll mentor them through their first five years to instill the culture that we want them to adopt, not our bad practices.”
Dave Pesiri, senior director of the Project Management Resource Center at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, agreed that given a renewed plutonium pit production mission at the lab, a mature workforce is essential.
“The ability to make sure that we’re building maturity, and we’re positioning our people for success is something that we spent a lot of time doing with our team at Los Alamos,” Pesiri said at the conference.
Building components for nuclear weapons in highly controlled and classified facilities with finite funding and notionally strict, though often elastic, timelines puts unique pressure on NNSA employees and those of its contractors, Pesiri said.
“On top of those stresses in our workforce, we’re seeing over 20 percent attrition over the last few years, much of it internally as the laboratory pivots from solely [research and development] culture and mindset,” Pesiri said.
While both Perisi and Robbins presented their workforce issues as opportunities, both are faced with rebuilding a knowledgeable employee base at a time when almost all aspects of the defense nuclear complex are being expanded and modernized.
Robbins laid out the avalanche of construction work that Y-12 and Pantex are facing in preparation for major nuclear weapon upgrades programs that are ongoing and expected to ramp up into the 2030s.
The NNSA Production Office, Los Alamos and other national security sites are gearing up to produce more warheads and weapon components than they have since the Cold War with buildings and infrastructure that in some cases dates to the Manhattan Project of World War II, she said.
“The biggest challenge that we have going forward is we have more work at Pantex and Y12 than we’ve had since the Manhattan Project. At that time, the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge, we built a huge infrastructure that was very practical for one weapon, and it was onesies twosies after that,” Robbins said.
“Proceed to the Cold War era. We weren’t investing in infrastructure any longer but we were mass producing nuclear weapons. Post Cold War we went into an era of not producing weapons, not modernizing our stockpile, nor modernizing our infrastructure,” Robbins said. “Today, we’re doing both. We have five weapons programs that are modernizing at the same time. And we also have more infrastructure … modernization work today than we’ve had since the Manhattan Project.”
“Put those two together, that’s quite a significant amount of work,” Robbins said.
