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U.S. Submarine Nuclear Warhead Refurbishment Program Faces Delays, Budget Overruns, DOE Says
The U.S. effort to refurbish submarine-launched W-76 nuclear warheads faces delays and increased costs caused by poor management, the Energy Department said in a report released Wednesday (see GSN, July 13, 2005). Seven nuclear weapons facilities, including the Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories in New Mexico, are involved in renewal work on the warheads produced in the 1970s and 1980s. Maintenance would allow roughly 3,000 warheads to remain in serve past 2030, the Albuquerque Journal reported. The first batch is due to undergo refurbishment next year, but the Energy Department’s Inspector General’s Office questioned the likelihood of that schedule. Testing and development of W-76 components began eight years ago, but there was no encompassing plan in the first five years for what and when work should be conducted, or for the budget for the project, investigators said. Not all testing is expected to be finished before refurbishment begins — four of seven tests at the Y-12 plant in Tennessee would be completed by that point. Delays could force refurbishment to begin after 2007, the Journal reported. Meanwhile, the cost of the work is expected to rise by $639 million to more than $2 billion upon the project’s anticipated completion in 2022. Federal officials noted problems with the project, but said they believe that work would begin as scheduled next year. “We’re very confident that we can achieve this goal,” said National Nuclear Security Administration spokesman Anson Franklin (John Fleck, Albuquerque Journal, June 1).
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