No accountability for the $billions being spent on Oak Ridge Uranium Processing Facility.

BUSTED! UPF bomb plant to break the bank at $11 Billion, UPF Update. Orepa.org 10 Sep 15

With Congress about to tackle budget issues again—at least for a Continuing Resolution to keep the government funded past the October 1 start of the new fiscal year, it’s worth taking a look at a multi-billion dollar project that seems to be doing little more than spending enormous amounts of tax dollars—yes, we’re talking about the Uranium Processing Facility. For sixteen months, the National Nuclear Security Administration and Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander have insisted the new nuclear weapon production plant slated for Oak Ridge, TN, the UPF, will be built for $6.5 billion or less. That’s after down-sizing the UPF from the original plan

…….NNSA has declined to release any other cost estimates, saying the public will have to wait until they reach the 90% design completion point—that’s expected to be sometime in the second half of 2016. By that time, more than one billion dollars will have been spent on this iteration of the UPF design. SILENCE IS GOLDEN In this case, maybe platinum. Or something even more extravagantly precious. For while NNSA refuses to say anything at all about its progress on the UPF, it continues to write checks to Bechtel, and Bechtel continues to cash them—to the tune of $430 million in the coming fiscal year. In the absence of numbers from NNSA, OREPA decided to tackle the math problem by asking a simple question. What percentage of a construction job is usually spent on the design of the facility being built?

The industry standard for a simple job is about 3.5%. For more complex jobs, it goes up, about 6.4%. That’s close to the original estimates for the UPF: Design was to cost $92 million and the total cost was estimated at $1.5 billion. For the purposes of our bomb plant, a one-of-a-kind nuclear facility facing significant safety challenges, let’s be conservative and say the design cost may run as high as 10% of the total cost. (NNSA, feel free to provide any real numbers to refute this math.)

………Our exercise in trying to calculate the cost of the UPF is crude—given real numbers, we might do better. But it is accurate enough to make the point—there is no way NNSA/Bechtel/Lockheed Martin will bring the UPF bomb plant in under $6.5 billion. That’s before we figure in NNSA’s unblemished record of massive cost overruns and schedule delays on major construction projects. The other thing our exercise makes clear is that there is no mystery here, there are just secrets. Because there are industry standards for almost every bit of the work being done—industry standards for calculating how far along a design is, 10, 20, 50 percent. And there are industry standards for how much each of those milestones represents in terms of final cost of a project. And there are even industry standards to allow for variances in unusual projects. It’s not that there is no information— it’s that NNSA and Senator Alexander are keeping it secret from the public. Why?

If NNSA and Lamar wanted to, they could fully account to the public for the billions being spent on the UPF. They could be transparent about the progress of the design team. And the public could judge for itself if things were on the upand-up. It might be reassuring to see the facts for what they are. And if the project is going off the tracks, an informed public could ask questions before our billions were spent rather than after. So at the risk of repeating ourselves, we ask: What possible reason could there be for this utter and complete lack of transparency if the project is on track? REALITY AND APPEARANCE It appears at this point, based on the admittedly skimpy evidence at hand, that NNSA is living up to its reputation, the one that keeps NNSA projects, including the UPF, on the Government Accountability Office’s high risk list year after year. If the reality differs from the appearance, the public has a right to know, and the government has a duty to disclose. That kind of accountability is the bedrock of democracy. Without it, money is wasted and government is corrupted and projects run on forever, paid for by taxpayers who can only wonder where the money is going. ……http://orepa.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/UPF-Update-September-2015.pdf