By Jeff Beattie
The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) unveiled some details yesterday of a proposal to significantly downsize the nation’s nuclear weapons complex, including closing two unspecified “major testing sites” and scaling back its weapons production workforce by at least 20 percent over the next five years.
NNSA, the semi-autonomous Energy Department agency that runs the department’s nuclear weapons complex, plans to fully reveal its downsizing plan in a draft Supplemental Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (SPEIS) that NNSA will issue in January.
But NNSA posted a summary of the SPEIS on-line Tuesday, and NNSA Administrator Thomas D’Agostino briefed reporters.
“Today’s nuclear weapons complex needs to move from the outdated, Cold War complex into one that is smaller, safer, more secure and less expensive,” he said in a statement.
“It needs to transform into a 21st century enterprise that leverages the scientific and technical capabilities of our workforce, is safer for our workforce, and meets evolving national security requirements for the future.”
Specifically, D’Agostino said NNSA will reduce the acreage occupied by its eight nuclear weapons sites by 30 percent by 2012, and scale back the size of its staff directly involved with weapons activities by 20-30 percent, likely entirely through attrition. NNSA will also begin dismantling weapons at a “significantly” faster pace, he said.
One of NNSA’s major goals in the restructuring is to save money by consolidating storage of weapons-usable nuclear material, such as high enriched uranium (HEU) and plutonium, leading to reduced security costs and smaller infrastructure requirements. D’Agostino said the changes are also needed to match the shrinkage of the U.S. weapons nuclear stockpile which, he said, by 2012 will be 80 percent smaller than it was at the height of the Cold War.
The NNSA plan responds to growing congressional pressure to reduce its security costs, which have ballooned by billions of dollars in the wake of the September 2001 terrorist attacks as the agency has sharply increased the number of guards and protective infrastructure at its sites. The biggest headaches are at the nine NNSA sites that store weapons- usable plutonium and HEU.
Some of the heaviest pressure has come from House appropriators, who have criticized past NNSA restructuring plans as insufficiently aggressive.
A special advisory panel convened by DoE in 2005 recommended NNSA consolidate all weapons production activities at one site to dramatically reduce security needs and boost operational efficiency.
But D’Agostino has said centralizing all weapons production at one site faces major political obstacles–because that might lead to closure of NNSA sites in several states–and that NNSA would not be able to carry out such a dramatic consolidation and still meet ongoing nuclear stockpile maintenance responsibilities.
NNSA does, however, plan to close “two major testing sites supporting our laboratories by 2015,” according to documents released Tuesday on the SPEIS.
In the conference call, D’Agostino did not specify which testing sites NNSA planned to close, which likely would face opposition from lawmakers representing areas with the DoE facilities with the chosen sites, largely over potential job losses.
D’Agostinso said a key criteria in selecting the two sites for elimination will be to identify those with “redundant functions,” such as testing how nuclear weapons stand up against severe environmental conditions.
Otherwise, some of the larger downsizing changes would take place at the Y-12 site at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, where NNSA plans reduce its high-security area by 90 percent; scale back its nuclear operations footprint by 60 percent and cut its buildings footprint by 50 percent.
At the Los Alamos site in New Mexico, NNSA proposes to consolidate plutonium and high-enriched uranium to two areas, with only one requiring levels of security needed for the most sensitive portion of the lab’s nuclear materials inventory. NNSA would reduce Los Alamos’ nuclear operations footprint by 50 percent, and its total building footprint by 20 percent. Los Alamos would retain its capacity to produce small numbers of plutonium pits, D’Agostino said.
NNSA also has substantial changes in mind for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, including reducing acreage utilized by NNSA’s weapons operations by 90 percent, and removing unspecified “quantities” of the most sensitive “category I and II” special nuclear materials–such as plutonium and HEU–from the site before 2013.
However, that may not be enough to please some lawmakers and NNSA critics, who say the agency should remove all plutonium and HEU from Lawrence Livermore due to the site’s close proximity to residential neighborhoods outside of San Francisco.
By comparison, NNSA plans relatively few changes for the Nevada Test Site, located 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, beyond a workforce reduction of up to 20 percent by 2012. NNSA plans to keep the massive desert site ready to resume underground nuclear testing in the event the president decides it is necessary.