Nuclear weaponsCostly DOE uranium processing facility questioned

Ashley Stowe has developed a single crystalline device that wilbe used in handheld detector // Source: commons.wikimedia.org

The cost of a proposed Department of Energy’s uranium processing facility for nuclear weapons at theY-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee has increase nineteen times – from the original estimate of $600 million to $11.6 billion. If these estimates are accurate, the processing facility would entail one the largest investments in the U.S. nuclear weapons infrastructure since the Manhattan Project.

The Los Angeles Times notes that this high estimate is that of the Army Corps of Engineers. The Energy Department has not disputed the corps’ estimate, even as its own official estimate is $4.2 billion to $6.5 billion. A spokeswoman at Y-12 stressed that the corps’ estimate was the highest of three outside agency reviews of the project.

The proposal for the facility was unveiled in 2005, and it calls for the development of a manufacturing plant at the Y-12 National Security Complex to produce new uranium cores for the U.S. stockpile of aging hydrogen bombs.

The Project on Government Oversight(POGO), a Washington, D.C. watchdog group, has  issued a report noting the high estimates by the Army Corps of Engineers, and arguing  that the work could be done for much less at existing facilities.

The Energy Department, since the end of the cold war, has been facing questions about the increasing cost, and dilapidated state, of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex. Questions have also been raised about the size of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile, and the cost of maintaining it.

Peter Stockton, author of the POGO reportdisputes the need for a new processing facility. Stockton calls for considering alternative sites such as the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas. The Pantex Plant has the capacity to “take on one of the most important missions of the would-be Uranium Processing Facility: the recertification of highly enriched uranium secondaries, a key component of a nuclear warhead. Not only would shifting this mission to Pantex save tens of millions of dollars; it would also reduce the transportation of nuclear weapons components across the country and fit well with the Pantex mission. The plant is already doing similar work on plutonium pit re-qualification,” He says.

In a report issued last week, scholars at the libertarian Cato Institute say that the cost of the U.S. nuclear force could be reduced by “eliminating the historic reliance on delivering bombs by three different systems: submarines, bombers and land-based missiles.” Cato defense analysts Benjamin Friedman and Christopher Preble suggest that the United States instead should invest in submarine-launched missiles as they are more accurate than land-based missiles and can provide deterrence at a much lower cost. Friedman and Preble also suggest that the Air Force would help save $20 billion without jeopardizing the U.S. deterrence posture if it did not modernize its fleet of intercontinental ballistic missiles.

— Read more in Uranium Processing Facility: When You’re in a Hole, Just Stop Digging (Project on Government Oversight, 25 September 2013); and Benjamin Friedman, Christopher Preble, and Matt Fay, The End of Overkill? Reassessing U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy (Cato Institute, 2013)