Recapitalization of the Nuclear Security Enterprise Infrastructure (2020 Presidential transition)

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Entire 2020 DOE Transition book

As of October 2020

Without predictable, stable, and timely funding from Congress, the age and condition of NNSA’s infrastructure will put NNSA’s mission, the safety of its workers, the public, and the environment at risk.

Summary

An effective, responsive, and resilient nuclear security infrastructure is essential to the U.S. capacity to be flexible enough to adapt to shifting requirements. Such an infrastructure offers tangible evidence to both allies and potential adversaries of U.S. nuclear weapons and nonproliferation capabilities and can help to deter, assure, and hedge against adverse developments, and discourage adversary interest in arms competition.

NNSA’s infrastructure is vast, extensive, complex, and, in many critical areas, several decades old. Sixty percent of NNSA’s facilities are beyond their life expectancy of 40 years and nearly forty percent are in poor condition. Many of the nuclear security enterprise’s (NSE) critical production, utility, safety, and support systems are failing.

NNSA manages its own industrial base within its NSE and does not rely solely upon the commercial industry’s infrastructure. This includes national laboratories, plants, and sites with many unique single point of failure production and test facilities that perform the research, development, production, testing, and dismantlement necessary to maintain and certify a safe, secure, reliable, and effective nuclear stockpile. This same infrastructure supports our nonproliferation and counter-terrorism mission (e.g., the same facilities that provide enriched uranium are also used to down-blend uranium).

Issue(s)

Infrastructure risks are generally considered to be high consequence, low probability events, making infrastructure investments a natural offset for short-term requirements. As a result, competing interests over the past thirty years postponed infrastructure modernization investments, which directly contributed to erosion of the critical infrastructure needed to ensure the U.S. nuclear deterrent’s viability into the future. The need to recapitalize elements of our infrastructure has reached a tipping point. Without consistent, stable, and predictable funding from Congress, the age and condition of NNSA’s infrastructure puts NNSA’s mission, the safety of its workers, the public, and the environment at greater risk.

Status

With support from the Administration and Congress, NNSA is undertaking a risk-informed infrastructure recapitalization effort. NNSA is making progress in repairing, replacing, and modernizing NNSA’s facilities and stabilizing deferred maintenance, yet much more remains to be done.

NNSA is working to better understand and quantify the condition of our infrastructure by introducing new tools and processes to quantify and prioritize our infrastructure needs. Some notable achievements in FY 2020 include:

  • Completed 4 projects with a total project cost of $174 million, under budget by $38 million and ahead of schedule by an average of 6 months.
  • Began Construction on 2 projects with a combined Total Project Cost of $219 million.
  • Began Conceptual Design on 2 projects worth $600 million and preliminary/final design on 3 projects worth $2.9 billion.
  • Performed $400 million of design work and $1 billion worth of construction.

Milestone(s)

Infrastructure modernization is one of the five major mission priorities for NNSA, as listed in our Strategic Integrated Roadmap. Major milestones include, but are not limited to:

Major Decisions/Events

The President’s FY 2021 budget supports the NNSA’s efforts to replace aging infrastructure with modern and efficient facilities. NNSA remains committed to achieving its major construction projects on schedule and on budget using best value acquisitions and ensuring safe quality construction.

Implementation of project management best practices, including the conduct of independent cost estimates, completing 90 percent design before establishing baselines, and properly aligning contractor incentives, will help ensure that the FY 2021 Request for these projects will be work executed on budget and schedule.

The Security Infrastructure Revitalization Program (SIRP) receives continued investment in FY 2021 to address physical security system upgrades at each NNSA lab, plant, and site.

Background

NNSA modernizes infrastructure by prioritizing investments to improve the condition and extend the life of structures, capabilities, and systems resulting in improvements in the safety, security, and quality of the workplace.

To accomplish this complex challenge, NNSA makes strategic, prioritized investments in

  1. Maintenance and Repair of Facilities;
  2. Recapitalization; and
  3. Line-Item Construction

These investments help achieve operational efficiencies and reduce safety, security, environmental, and program risk. NNSA uses prioritized enterprise risk management criteria to maximize return on investment, achieve program results, and reduce enterprise risk.

NNSA is simultaneously re-capitalizing our production capability in plutonium, uranium, lithium, tritium, and high explosives, as well as our ability for uranium enrichment and plutonium disposal. These simultaneous efforts will be a focus for NNSA for the next two to three decades. Additionally, NNSA is working to modernize aging and deteriorating mission-enabling infrastructure, such as light laboratories, utilities, manufacturing shops, emergency operations centers, and office buildings. To this end, NNSA is currently managing 30 LineItem Construction projects worth $22 billion.

Among our top security priorities, NNSA is focused on recapitalizing the NSE’s security infrastructure. This includes replacing and refreshing aging physical and cyber security infrastructure. NNSA initiated a security revitalization program several years ago to refresh its security infrastructure with a consistent budgetary approach to avoid large budget spikes. Mission growth is also driving increased security requirements across the NSE. Examples of these security investments include

  1. new security systems and additional security portals to support more mission work, and
  2. new perimeter intrusion detection and assessment systems (PIDAS)

The West End Protected Area Reduction Project reduces the Perimeter Intrusion Detection and Assessment System footprint by almost half while integrating with the new Uranium Processing Facility at the Y-12 National Security Complex.

Between FY 2015 and FY 2020, NNSA requested a higher percentage of funding for Recapitalization and Maintenance projects. These funding increases are essential to arresting the declining state of infrastructure, increasing productivity, improving safety, eliminating costly compensatory measures, decreasing DM, and shrinking the NNSA footprint through the disposition of unneeded facilities.

During this period, in FY 2018, Congress directed NNSA to establish the Infrastructure Modernization Initiative to reduce DM by 30 percent by 2025. At the end of FY 2019, NNSA’s total DM on fixed assets (real property) stood at $4.8 billion. Excessive DM is an indication of the risks posed by infrastructure, but it is a financial surrogate that does not adequately measure condition, functionality, importance, or replaceability of infrastructure.

Therefore, NNSA is working to address DM, but our primary focus is on reducing the risk aging infrastructure poses to our workers, the environment, and the mission. Accordingly, we are deploying a new, science-based infrastructure stewardship approach that focuses on data-driven, risk-informed decision-making using innovative infrastructure tools and metrics to better assess conditions and prioritize investments.

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