nuclear-news

Financial realities lead to scrapping of costly Los Alamos expansion plan

U.S. NUCLEAR LAB READY TO SHELVE COSTLY FACILITY PLAN NextGov 22 Feb 13, The Los Alamos National Laboratory is proposing to shelve plans to build an expensive new plutonium research facility and instead permanently parcel out work to an array of smaller buildings, the institution’s director said on Thursday.

“I’m concerned that in the current fiscal crisis, it may no longer be practical to plan and build very large-scale nuclear facilities,” Charles McMillan, who heads the New Mexico research site, said at a three-day conference on nuclear deterrence in Arlington, Va. “A new path forward is needed.”

A study team at Los Alamos has suggested scrapping plans to construct a $6 billion Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement plant in favor of replacing the nuclear facility’s intended functions with a more attainable constellation of structures, he said.

The new approach would involve a combination of new construction — albeit at a more modest price — along with “repurposing” some existing sites, McMillan told the conference audience. The future CMRR facility was to help ensure that new and existing nuclear-weapon cores would function in an atomic blast, if necessary, despite a decades-long moratorium on underground explosive testing.

Early last year, the Obama administration announced that it intended to save $1.8 billion over the next five years by delaying construction of the new CMRR nuclear lab for a half-decade. The site had been expected to be up and operating by 2024, but the budget move delayed those plans indefinitely.

Now it appears that temporary workarounds for meeting near-term plutonium “pit” research needs could be altered slightly to become a permanent alternative to designs for the ambitious complex.

“This means the new nuclear facility, as it was originally designed, is dead,” Stephen Young, a senior analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Global Security Newswire after hearing the laboratory director’s comments. “There may be a new building, but it won’t be that big, expensive box.”

“I challenged the team at Los Alamos to explore alternatives that would provide the capabilities that CMRR represented, but to do that in ways that would be simpler,” McMillan said in prepared remarks. “Based on the work that they’ve done over the last year, I believe we should look at designing and building small, individual facilities to meet specific tasks for supporting the [nuclear weapons] stockpile.”…….

Last year, hundreds of millions of dollars were cut out of nuclear infrastructure budgets and additional reductions are widely anticipated in the future. More draconian budget cuts could materialize as early as next week in the form of the budget sequester, which experts say would make big federal construction projects almost unthinkable.

Congressional Republicans in 2012 pushed back against the Obama plan to delay building the CMRR nuclear facility. The president early this year signed into law a fiscal 2013 defense authorization bill that demands the laboratory building be constructed and operating by the end of 2026.

Young speculated that political and fiscal realities will ultimately trump last month’s law, and the provisions demanding CMRR construction will be reversed.

“Congress will, in the end, support this decision,” he said. “The unified position of the administration and the labs, combined with budget pressures, make it almost inevitable.”……. http://www.nextgov.com/emerging-tech/2013/02/us-nuclear-lab-ready-shelve-costly-facility-plan/61468/?oref=ng-dropdown

February 24, 2013 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, USA, weapons and war