ECA Update: September 17, 2012
Published: Mon, 09/17/12
Manhattan Project Park Act set for House floor vote on Wednesday
The Manhattan Project National Historical Park Act (H.R. 5987) is scheduled for consideration by the House of Representatives on September 19, 2012. The bill would establish the Manhattan Project National Historical Park in Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Los Alamos, New Mexico; and Hanford, Washington.
The bill is scheduled for consdiered under "suspension of the rules," which is a procedure generally used to quickly pass non-controversial bills.
The House Majority Leader's weekly legislative schedule is available here.
Aging U.S. nuclear arsenal slated for costly and long-delayed modernization Dana Priest, The Washington Post September 15, 2012 The U.S. nuclear arsenal, the most powerful but indiscriminate class of weapons ever created, is set to undergo the costliest overhaul in its history, even as the military faces spending cuts to its conventional arms programs at a time of fiscal crisis.
For two decades, U.S. administrations have confronted the decrepit, neglected state of the aging nuclear weapons complex. Yet officials have repeatedly put off sinking huge sums into projects that receive little public recognition, driving up the costs even further.
Now, as the nation struggles to emerge from the worst recession of the postwar era and Congress faces an end-of-year deadline to avoid $1.2 trillion in automatic cuts to the federal budget over 10 years, the Obama administration is overseeing the gargantuan task of modernizing the nuclear arsenal to keep it safe and reliable.
There is no official price tag for the effort to upgrade and maintain the 5,113 warheads in the inventory, to replace old delivery systems and to renovate the aging facilities where nuclear work is performed. A study this summer by the nonpartisan Stimson Center, a Washington think tank, estimated costs would be at least $352 billion over the coming decade to operate and modernize the current arsenal. Others say the figure could be far higher, particularly if the work is delayed even longer.
The timing does not fit with the nation's evolving defense posture, either. Over the past decade, the U.S. military has moved away from nuclear deterrence and major military interventions in favor of more precise tactics rooted in Special Operations forces and quick tactical strikes deemed more effective against today's enemies.
Federal officials and many outside analysts are nonetheless convinced that, after years of delay, the government must invest huge sums if it is to maintain the air, sea and land nuclear triad on which the country has relied since the start of the Cold War. Failing to act before the end of next year, they say, is likely to mean that there won't be enough time to design and build the new systems that would be required if the old arsenal is no longer safe or reliable.
"I've been doing this for 20 years, and I haven't seen a moment like this," Thomas P. D'Agostino, who leads the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the federal agency charged with managing the safety of the nuclear arsenal, said in an interview.
The debate over the future of the nation's nuclear arsenal is playing out in Congress and within the administration. Public reports, interviews with government officials and outside experts and visits to nuclear facilities rarely seen by outsiders provided a portrait of the scope and cost of maintaining and refurbishing the nuclear stockpile underlying the debate.
Expense has loomed for years
At the heart of the overhaul are the weapons themselves. Renovating nuclear bombs and missiles to keep them safe and ready for use will cost tens of billions of dollars. Upgrading just one of the seven types of weapons in the stockpile, the B61 bomb, is likely to cost $10 billion over five years, according to the Pentagon. The next two types of bombs in line for modification are estimated to cost a total of at least $5 billion. By comparison, the operating budget for Fairfax County government next year will cost about $3.5 billion, including its vaunted school system.
Replacing the aircraft, submarines and ground-launch systems that carry nuclear payloads will be the most expensive budget item. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated it would cost up to $110 billion to build 12 replacements for the aging Ohio-class submarines first launched in the 1980s. The Minuteman III ballistic missiles are undergoing a $7 billion upgrade even as a new generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles is under consideration. Meanwhile, a nuclear-capable fleet of F-35 strike aircraft is being built to replace existing aircraft at a cost of $162 million an airplane.
Finally, there are the buildings and laboratories where the refurbishment of weapons and development of new technologies take place. Modernizing those facilities is expected to cost at least $88 billion over 10 years, according to the NNSA, which is part of the Department of Energy.
The need to spend heavily to modernize the nation's shrinking nuclear stockpile has been apparent for at least two decades. President George H.W. Bush reduced the stockpile by nearly 40 percent and imposed a ban on nuclear testing. President Bill Clinton extended the ban while reaffirming the importance of maintaining the arsenal's safety and performance.
President George W. Bush came into office in 2001 planning to shrink and modernize the vast and deteriorating nuclear complex. Although he cut the stockpile by almost 50 percent and made some progress on renovating the complex, the effort was largely derailed by the costs and complications of two wars. All the while, the backlog of urgent repairs accumulated, and the hidden costs increased steadily.
To catch up, the Obama administration's budget for refurbishing the nuclear stockpile went from $6.4 billion in 2010 to a $7.5 billion request for next year -- a 17 percent increase at a time of budget constraints. To help pay the bills, this year the Defense Department agreed for the first time to contribute $8 billion over five years.
"We came in thinking it had been taken care of and were shocked to hear how poorly it had been treated," said Jon Wolfsthal, who worked on nuclear weapons issues for the Obama White House until March.
While the administration was surprised by the state of the stockpile, the decision to spend heavily on modernization was also driven by a deal cut with Senate Republicans in late 2010. As part of negotiations to win ratification of the New START accord and reduce the nuclear weapons maintained by the United States and Russia, the administration agreed to increase money for modernizing the nuclear-weapons complex. Some Republicans say the administration isn't spending enough.
Los Alamos in disrepair
Situated on a remote mesa in the Jemez Mountains of northern New Mexico, Los Alamos National Laboratory was built secretly in early 1943 for the sole purpose of designing and building America's first atomic bomb. In the decades since, the lab has emerged as one of the nation's premier nuclear weapons design and research facilities, with 11,000 employees.
But parts of Los Alamos are in serious disrepair. Inside one critical building, pipes carrying dangerous wastewater are duct-taped together at the joints to plug leaks; plastic bags have been wrapped around the tape to trap seepage.
The building, called Wing 5, is part of the 50-year-old Chemistry and Metallurgy Research plant, which performs research on plutonium cores, the explosive "pits" for nuclear weapons. Sometimes liquid accidentally splashes under the ill-fitting doors and spills into the hallway, Bret Knapp, who heads the lab's weapons program, said during a rare visit by an outsider. When a spill occurs, the building must be evacuated until inspectors can make sure that the liquid is not radioactive.
On other occasions, when the lights in the dilapidated structure flicker, electricians struggling to restore power pry open dozens of fuse boxes and expose brittle wiring far out of compliance with modern building codes.
The aging facility was slated for replacement 20 years ago. But in 1998, designers identified a fault line beneath the structure. The discovery pushed the price of reconstruction so high that no administration was willing to sign off. The Obama administration says safety requires its replacement -- at a cost of $6 billion. Critics in Congress and among anti-nuclear groups, however, say the expensive new plant is unnecessary and would still present environmental dangers if built on the fault line.
The metallurgy facility at Los Alamos isn't even the most pressing example of neglect and deterioration among the 40 buildings nationwide that the NNSA says need repair. That dubious honor goes to Building 9212, a uranium-processing facility at the Y-12 National Security Complex near Oak Ridge, Tenn.
Known in its heyday as the "Secret City," Y-12 produced highly enriched uranium for "Little Boy," the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. Today, Y-12 is the primary facility for processing and storing weapons-grade uranium and developing related technologies.
The 150-acre complex was in the news in late July when three peace activists, including an 82-year-old nun, cut the outer security fence, slipped past the perimeter and reached a building where highly enriched uranium is stored. They splashed blood on the outer walls and carried banners denouncing nuclear weapons. Though they never got inside the facility, the incident sparked a two-week shutdown at the plant and a security review across the nuclear complex. Several officials have been fired or reassigned.
Nearby is Building 9212. Protected by layers of razor wire two stories high and monitored by surveillance cameras and motion sensors, technicians inside process enriched uranium for civilian and naval nuclear reactors. Armed guards greet the few authorized visitors allowed into the structure. The operations inside Building 9212 are deemed so vital that an unplanned shutdown could cause critical problems across the nuclear supply chain. An extended stoppage would disrupt the weapons safety work and could force the closing of domestic and foreign civilian reactors that rely on low-enriched uranium from the facility, according to the NNSA.
No reporter had been allowed inside Building 9212 before The Washington Post's visit. Because of the radioactivity, visitors and workers must wear multiple pairs of yellow rubber gloves, socks and booties, an overcoat, goggles, a head covering and thermoluminescent dosimeters that measure possible radiation exposure.
Conditions inside belie the significance of the work and the danger of the radioactive material.
The building is made of clay tile and cinder blocks and looks its age. Darrel Kohlhorst, the general manager at the time, pointed out large patches of rust and corrosion on interior walls. He said the walls and roof leak when it rains.
"If water hits the floor, we treat it like a contaminated spill," he said, adding that workers must mop the floors three times a day -- and incinerate the mop heads afterward.
The floors themselves are stainless-steel panels bolted together at thick seams. With age, they have become uneven and warped. Control panels resemble props on a 1950s sci-fi movie set, with oversize black-and-white dials and big red "start" and "stop" buttons.
Plant officials said the outdated equipment has not caused a major safety problem only because they halt operations even when minor things go wrong. For instance, when one of the giant, half-century-old exhaust fans goes on the blink, the repair time idles 30 people "for a $15 part," said Daniel Hoag, then deputy manager of Y-12. Two years ago, the vacuum system that keeps air flowing broke down, and the facility was closed for two weeks.
Nuclear experts say the building should have been replaced years ago. But successive administrations decided to fund less costly renovations and purely scientific endeavors instead. In the meantime, the replacement cost has risen from $600 million in 2004 to $6.5 billion today.
Explaining the huge increase, NNSA spokesman Joshua McConaha said that initial cost estimates are always "speculative" and that final figures can't be determined until most of the design work is finished.
Other factors push up costs. These nuclear facilities are one-of-a-kind plants, and the expertise and equipment needed to build them often doesn't exist anymore, so it has to be invented.
"We're facing questions that have never been asked or answered, and we're doing it 20 years after the urgency of the Cold War," McConaha said. "We're building rare, incredibly complex nuclear facilities that nobody has had to build in decades."
Some 640 people are designing the new uranium processing plant at Y-12. It will use 10 experimental technologies still being invented. There will be elaborate air filtration systems, duplicative electrical and fire control systems, redundant security barriers, earthquake-proof concrete floors and impenetrable vaults -- all required to maintain and work with highly radioactive material.
The construction requirements for new nuclear facilities can be seen not far from the 9212 site. The storage facility for highly enriched uranium where the July break-in occurred was completed in 2010 with 90,000 square feet of concrete. Its walls are 30 feet thick and two stories tall, with hidden gun ports. Inside the concrete box, every scrap of radioactive waste is carried to its eventual tomb by a series of mechanical arms and lifts requiring no human touch. Databases and computers track every trace of radioactive material continuously in this paperless, sterile world.
Chronic poor planning
Much of the blame for the soaring costs has fallen on the National Nuclear Security Administration, the division of the Department of Energy responsible for managing and modernizing the nuclear stockpile. For years, the Government Accountability Office, the Pentagon and some lawmakers have cited the NNSA for chronic poor planning and bad management. The GAO has had the NNSA on its "high-risk list" for fraud, waste and abuse in contracting and management since 1990.
Government reports show that the NNSA has blown budgets across the board. For instance, the projected cost of a new weapons conversion facility at the DOE's Savannah River Site in South Carolina rose to $5 billion from $1.4 billion. It was eventually scrapped -- after $700 million in planning costs. The cost of building a new fuel fabrication facility at Savannah River also has tripled to $5 billion, and it is scheduled to open in 2016, a decade late.
The George W. Bush administration's solution to NNSA's chronic problems was to transfer management of the national laboratories to profit-making corporations in 2008. Privatization was supposed to cut costs and boost efficiency, but GAO investigators and lawmakers say it is not clear that either has happened.
One concern is unexplained increases in administrative costs, which have reached about 40 percent of the labs' budget, according to figures provided by NNSA. In fact, the annual contracts to run the facilities are among the largest in government -- nearly $2.6 billion a year to operate Los Alamos and $2.4 billion for Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque.
The Defense Department became so alarmed by NNSA's construction record that it recently embedded a team at the agency to examine books and management practices and come up with more realistic cost figures for projects under consideration.
Republicans say they support increased spending on the nuclear arsenal, but last year they were unable to muster the votes to fund the president's entire budget request. Some worry, though, that costs are out of hand. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), ranking member of the Armed Services Committee's subcommittee on strategic forces, said the NNSA management approach "perpetuates the status quo mentality that everything nuclear has to be expensive."
Nuclear Posture Review
In an April 2009 speech, President Obama outlined his vision of a world free of nuclear weapons. Acknowledging that his goal might not be accomplished in his lifetime, Obama laid out an agenda for forging new partnerships to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, ending production of fissile material for weapons and ratifying new treaties to reduce their numbers.
Since then, though, the president has taken few steps to implement his objective. On the contrary, his 2010 Nuclear Posture Review, which lays out the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. security strategy, promised to maintain the triad of nuclear weapons favored by every president since Dwight Eisenhower.
In December 2010, the Senate approved ratification of the New START accord with Russia, which limits both sides to 1,550 warheads. But no progress has been made on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which would curb development of new nuclear weapons and impose a permanent ban on nuclear tests by signatories.
Over the past year, the president has been calculating his next nuclear step. Civilian and military advisers have presented him with countless options as he sets more precise guidelines that military planners will translate into intricate targeting plans.
The White House declined to comment on the president's strategic direction, but some government officials and outside experts said they believe he favors renewed talks with the Russians to drop the warhead total from 1,550 to 1,100. Few, however, expect any announcement until after the presidential election in November. All of the president's decisions, from the broad nuclear structure to the number of warheads and the top-secret target list, cascade through the nuclear establishment, affecting the types of weapons and delivery systems that must be available to meet the objectives.
For their part, many anti-nuclear activists favor disarmament by atrophy, which would mean not repairing or extending the life span of the current arsenal. For now, the administration and its supporters argue that the country must maintain its nuclear assets as long as other nations are nuclear-armed.
Still, a growing number of former senior administration officials from both parties argue that more substantial cuts would encourage nonnuclear states to abandon their nuclear ambitions, making the world safer from political miscalculations and saving money for defense items that are actually used.
Among the members of this eclectic group are former Reagan administration officials George Shultz, Robert "Bud" McFarlane and Frank Carlucci; Clinton's former defense secretary William Perry and ambassador to Russia Thomas Pickering; and retired Marine Gen. James Cartwright, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Obama and a former commander of U.S. nuclear forces.
"There are a growing number of my peers on the uniformed military side, and especially among civilian analysts and those on the policy side," who believe a smaller and more modern force is appropriate, Cartwright said in an interview. "What we have is way more than what we need."
Spending limits
The nuclear arsenal has not entirely escaped cuts. To comply with the new Budget Control Act spending limits, the NNSA decided this year that it could not afford to replace both the crumbling plutonium testing facility at Los Alamos for $6 billion and the deteriorating uranium processing facility in Building 9212 at Oak Ridge for $6.5 billion.
The NNSA chose to rehab Building 9212 because there was no alternative site where the critical work carried out there could be performed.
So, after 250 contractors moved into Los Alamos last year and tractors dug out 160,000 cubic feet of volcanic tuff rock from the side of a hill, NNSA and the administration decided that building a new plutonium-testing site would be delayed five years. The crews stopped work. The tractors were idled. A new reality sank in.
That new reality means some of the plutonium will be shipped to other facilities. Every couple of days, a UPS truck will deliver a dime-size slice of plutonium to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 45 miles east of San Francisco. Larger quantities of plutonium will be carried by secure vans to the Nevada National Security Site northwest of Las Vegas. Plutonium remaining at Los Alamos will be hand-delivered via an underground tunnel from one building to another.
The tunnel is being upgraded, and renovations are underway at Livermore and the Nevada site to handle the plutonium. Officials estimate the changes in the three locations will cost an additional $650 million over the next five years.
The B61 bomb: A case study in costs and needs Dana Priest, The Washington Post September 16, 2012 ALBUQUERQUE -- On the outskirts of New Mexico's largest city, a team of engineers at Sandia National Laboratories is engaged in a long-running treasure hunt to make sure the oldest weapon in America's nuclear arsenal, the B61 bomb, remains safe for deployment.
They cannibalize spare B61s for parts, such as the vacuum tubes needed to keep the radars working on active bombs. If they don't have spares, they track down outdated machines to manufacture the components themselves, as they did when they bought a machine to produce integrated circuits.
But after the manufacturer of the circuits went bankrupt and its machines were no longer available, the Sandia engineers had to become even more innovative.
"We bought three or four on eBay," Gilbert Herrera, who manages Sandia's microsystems research and facilities, said as he stood on the work floor recently. "For $100,000 apiece."
The B61 was once heralded as a cornerstone of the country's air-delivered nuclear force. Developed as a major deterrent against Soviet aggression in Europe, it is a slender gray cylinder that weighs 700 pounds and is 11 feet long and 13 inches in diameter. It can be delivered by a variety of aircraft, including NATO planes, anywhere in the world.
Now, nearly five decades after the first version rolled out of Los Alamos National Laboratory 100 miles north of here, age threatens to make the workhorse of the arsenal unreliable. So the B61 is poised to undergo a major renovation to extend its life span, a project that could cost as much as $10 billion, according to the Pentagon, or about $25 million for each of the 400 or so left in the arsenal.
The current estimate is more than double some early projections, so high that the Federation of American Scientists, a respected Washington disarmament think tank, dubbed it the "gold-plated nuclear bomb project."
The Obama administration and Congress have pushed the program forward despite the enormous cost of refurbishing such complex weapons and over the strenuous objections of some nuclear strategists, who say the threat the B61 was designed to counter disappeared with the Cold War. Advocates, including the Obama administration, argue that the bomb is still essential to U.S. national security. In their view, the B61s deployed in Europe are the most concrete example of shared responsibility among the NATO countries, providing the indispensable psychological glue that binds the often-fractious alliance.
The B61s represent less than 10 percent of the 5,113 bombs and missiles that make up the U.S. nuclear arsenal. In the coming decade, updating vast elements of the nation's nuclear weapons complex -- from weapons to delivery systems to the labs and plants that make and test them -- is expected to cost at least $352 billion, according to the Stimson Center, another nonpartisan Washington think tank.
Eighty percent of the stockpile's bombs and missiles are scheduled for major renovations similar to those for the B61. The National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees the complex, predicts that the work will take 25 years of intense effort by the country's leading physicists, material scientists, engineers and computer programmers. The NNSA has not put a cost on the total weapons overhaul, but it is certain to top $20 billion, according to preliminary government figures.
The B61 provides a case study in the expense and innovations driving the ambitious effort to maintain the nation's nuclear defenses at a time of fiscal constraints and a shift away from reliance on nuclear deterrence.
The most versatile in the stockpile
Sandia National Laboratories is the engineering center of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex, a sprawling collection of labs and warehouses at Kirtland Air Force Base on the eastern edge of Albuquerque. Sandia's primary mission is ensuring the safety, security and reliability of the nuclear arsenal.
Inside one of those warehouses, on a gray-painted floor, sits a full-scale replica of the B61. The model is where young engineers and nuclear maintenance technicians learn to care for the aging weapon. A preflight control panel displays the commands that technicians are trained to carry out: "Delivery/Option/Delay" and "Strike Enable" to detonate the fearsome bomb.
The device looks simple, but its appearance is deceptive. Inside are 6,500 parts, making the bomb one of the most complex weapons in the arsenal. The firing mechanism alone has 400 components.
Built to withstand supersonic speeds, the B61 is the most versatile weapon in the stockpile. It can be carried long distances by a wide number of aircraft, from a B-2 stealth bomber flying from a base in Missouri to North Korea or China to an F-16 or Tornado jet fighter flying to Russia from a NATO base in Europe.
The versatility extends to the explosive power. Different variations produce different yields, the "dial-a-yield," or DAY. Depending on the warhead, the president could choose an explosion slightly less powerful than the one that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945, or he could dial it up to a thermonuclear blast 30 times as strong.
The B61 can be dropped free-fall or with a parachute, detonated in the air or on the ground. Its Kevlar parachute, wrapped so tightly it is as hard as an oak tree's trunk, can slow the bomb's descent speed from 1,000 mph to 35 mph.
Five versions are still in service. The latest is the B61-11, activated in the mid-1990s as the only ground-penetrating nuclear weapon, known as the "bunker buster." It is designed to reach hardened bunkers buried far underground and to detonate its nuclear payload on a time delay.
As the most modern version, the bunker buster will escape renovation. The other four models will be collapsed into a single version, an experiment never tried before, according to nuclear weapons experts.
Tight deadline for reinvention
Modernizing a nuclear weapon is not like upgrading any other machine. In the automobile industry, for example, cars are improved each year to reflect the latest technological advances and design changes. By contrast, few of the B61's major components have been rebuilt to 21st-century, digital-age standards.
Most of the new components will not be replacements. They will be completely new, state-of-the-art versions, designed and built with equipment that did not even exist when the first iterations were turned out in the mid-1960s. "The entire arsenal was built with less computational power than what's inside an iPhone," one weapons manager said.
Arrays of supercomputers, advanced electronics and astonishingly detailed simulations will be used to renew the B61. The bombs will get new batteries, new neutron generators to ignite the thermonuclear explosion and new radar systems to signal when the bomb should detonate. New tail kits and special electronics will transform the B61 into the first precision-guided nuclear bomb, which means the designers can get rid of the parachute.
The first renovation must be completed within five years -- a blink of an eye in the world of nuclear design and engineering -- and all of them have to be done by 2022. If the work veers off schedule -- something the Government Accountability Office and the Pentagon say they fear, given the NNSA's record of delays and cost overruns -- the life expectancy of the old bombs will expire and they will no longer be regarded as reliable.
Even if the work meets the deadline, the B61 faces an uncertain future outside the United States. Some NATO countries see nuclear weapons as the last remnant of the Cold War and face increasing calls from anti-nuclear and environmental groups to get them off their soil.
In Germany, popular support is growing for removing the B61s stationed at a German air force base near the village of Buchel in the western part of the country. Short of such a drastic step, the German government has not committed to paying for the expensive upgrades required to carry nuclear weapons when it replaces its aging fleet of Tornado aircraft with the new Eurofighter.
The plans of NATO allies are not the only threat to the B61. Some members of Congress have questioned the soaring cost of the redesign and the old bomb's place in the modern arsenal.
Computer-simulated explosions
The B61 traces its lineage to the first nuclear test, which occurred on the morning of July 16, 1945, in the desert near Alamogordo, N.M. The detonation of the first atomic bomb at the Trinity Site took place less than three weeks before the bomb called Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, killing 70,000 people instantly and at least the same number from radiation exposure and injuries over the next five years.
In the years that followed, the United States conducted more than 1,000 nuclear tests as it perfected and expanded its nuclear arsenal during the arms race with the Soviet Union. Hundreds of tests also were conducted by other nuclear powers, including the Soviet Union, Britain, France and China. President George H.W. Bush called a halt to U.S. nuclear tests in 1992. His decision was reaffirmed in 1996 when President Bill Clinton signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The Senate rejected the treaty in 1999 and has not voted on it again, but the ban has remained in place. Russia, Britain and France are among the 36 countries that have ratified the treaty.
Without the ability to test, the United States still must guarantee that its arsenal is reliable and safe. So nuclear physicists and computer engineers have turned to mimicking nuclear explosions through some of the world's most sophisticated computer simulations.
The virtual tests occur at the Los Alamos laboratory. From a glass-enclosed viewing room, a visitor can see supercomputers with 32,000 processors lined up in a vast, sterile room. Together, the machines can run 1.35 petaflops of data per second -- a single petaflop is the equivalent of a million billion calculations. Lab officials said it takes programmers six months just to write the code to create a simulation of that magnitude. And the supercomputers and processors need an additional three weeks of churning 24 hours a day every day to process the code, even at petaflop speed.
The best view of this miracle of engineering and science is from inside what programmers call the "cave," an array of high-resolution monitors in X Division, the weapons-design section at Los Alamos. The results are mind-boggling in their detail and precision, a true-to-life simulation that allows scientists to test the properties of materials and components used in a thermonuclear weapon without actually detonating a device.
Wearing three-dimensional glasses and standing on the cave floor, the rare outsider can watch animations that don't just look like a missile hitting a wall and crumpling, but depict the actual way a missile hitting a wall would crumple, down to the molecular level of the metals used in the missile's nose cone, body and tail fins.
Another simulation, restricted to personnel with only the highest security clearances, re-creates the reaction inside the thermonuclear explosive package of a warhead. It shows the signal sent to the detonator and the detonation of high explosives that trigger the critical mass. The trigger ignites the primary radioactive plutonium component, which in turn sets off the secondary uranium device, which in turn dramatically increases the power of the blast.
The advances in computer simulations, combined with the data from actual past tests, have allowed scientists to understand more about the physical attributes of nuclear weapons than the scientists who invented them. Now, they say, this knowledge will allow them to add 20 years to the quiet life of the B61. But not more.
Staggering sums
All of this modernization and invention requires staggering sums, time and testing. Twenty-eight teams of scientists and engineers at Los Alamos and Sandia determined what would be required in terms of new technology to update the B61 -- and how much it would cost.
In the fall of 2011, a little-known interagency group called the Nuclear Weapons Council gathered in Washington to hear the results of the project. The council coordinates work by the NNSA and Pentagon on nuclear weapons and must approve any technical changes. Its members include senior officials from the Defense Department and the Energy Department and the head of the NNSA.
When the group gathered a year ago and first heard the new price tag for the B61, there was stunned silence even in a roomful of people accustomed to dealing with billions of dollars. "It was the trigger that sucked all the air out of the room," one participant said.
The cost was $7 billion for an estimated 400 bombs. The explanation was that it had climbed so high in part because designers had added more safety features to an already nearly foolproof bomb, namely an optical scanner that required a retina scan from authorized personnel. Eventually the scanner and some other new equipment were dropped to save money, cutting the cost to $6 billion.
But recently, an independent Pentagon assessment concluded the cost would actually be much higher -- at least $8 billion and possibly as high as $10 billion, according to Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on energy and water development, which has funding jurisdiction over the NNSA. Officials at the agency say it is too early in the process to have an accurate budget figure for the program.
The soaring cost has rippled through other modernization programs. To try to keep the entire stockpile overhaul within budget, the administration delayed refurbishing two other aging warheads used on Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles by three years and pushed back construction of a new nuclear-armed submarine by two years.
In the complex matrix of repairs and deployments, the two-year delay in submarine modernization means that at some point in the near future, the nuclear-armed sub fleet patrolling the oceans will be reduced by two vessels for a period of time.
Each delay adds to the cost of maintaining the nuclear status quo. But the work goes on. An Air Force team with a $340 million budget is trying to figure out how to mount the B61 onto its new F-35 fighter jet, which itself is expected to be the most expensive weapon in U.S. history. And once the B61 overhaul is completed, the nation's vast nuclear weapons complex will turn its attention to the next major weapons renovations: the W78 and W88, a pair of thermonuclear warheads whose redo is already predicted to cost at least $5 billion more.
White House details 'devastating' cuts under sequestration Sean Reilly, Federal Times September 14, 2012 Scientific research would be curtailed, the ranks of federal law enforcement officers slashed, and military procurement funding whacked if Congress fails to prevent automatic budget cuts from occurring in January, the Obama administration said in a Friday report.
Across government, the impact of the so-called sequestration cuts would be "deeply destructive," the report said.
Numerous defense programs would have to absorb 9.4 percent spending cuts while many discretionary domestic programs would be reduced 8.2 percent.
In all, cuts to discretionary spending would add up to $109 billion, the report said. The report detailed how more than 1,200 programs, ranging from the Agriculture Department's Food Safety and Inspection Service to the Defense Department's Afghanistan Infrastructure Fund, would be affected.
The cuts would "have a significant impact on the federal workforce," a senior administration official told reporters in a conference call, although the report does not detail whether employee furloughs or layoffs would be needed. Military personnel and all of the Veterans Affairs Department would be exempt from the cuts. He and other White House staff spoke on condition that they not be identified.
Last year's Budget Control Act requires the across-the board cuts -- formally known as sequestration -- to kick in Jan. 2 unless Congress and the White House agree on a path to reduce future budget deficits by $1.2 trillion through 2021.
The report's dire forecast likely will bring added pressure on the White House and Congress to negotiate a long-term budget deal to avert sequestration, said Steve Bell, a former Senate Budget Committee staffer who is now with the Bipartisan Policy Center think tank.
The projected consequences of sequestration are based on this year's spending levels and could change depending on the final version of a continuing resolution for the first six months of fiscal 2013 now moving through Congress.
The report, required by the Sequestration Transparency Act signed last month, was supposed to have been released by Sept. 6. The White House attributed the delay to the tight timeframe and the complexity of the issue.
"We wanted to produce a thorough report as fast as we could and we delivered that," the administration official said Friday.
After Next Week, House Stopping Work Until Election Billy House, National Journal September 14, 2012 Majority Leader Eric Cantor announced on Friday that, after next week, the House won't be returning to session until after the Nov. 6 elections.
A planned one-week session in Washington at the start of October has been scrapped. That means when the House adjourns next Friday, the chamber will not be scheduled to cast any votes again until Nov. 13.
Speaking on the House floor, Cantor said that the decision for House members not to return to the Capitol in October has been made given the Senate's anticipated passage next week of a bill to keep government running beyond the Oct. 1 start of the new fiscal year, a bill already passed on Thursday in the House.
The House still plans to hold its session next week as scheduled, starting next Wednesday evening, through Friday. One bill Republicans plan to bring to the floor next week would create a new green-card category for foreigners who have received doctorate degrees from U.S. universities in science, technology, engineering, and math (the so-called STEM disciplines).
Minority Whip Steny Hoyer responded on the floor with some incredulity, saying that although there remains much legislation left to be completed, Cantor's announcement means that lawmakers now have about two days of session work remaining. The two then argued about which party is to blame for stalled or no action on such issues as the farm bill, postal-service reform, the Violence Against Women Act, and renewing the George W. Bush-era tax cuts.
At one point, when Cantor included the farm bill in his comments about Democratic refusal to engage in "real reform" in some of those bills, Hoyer fired back that it is the House Republican leadership that has chosen not to bring a bipartisan bill to the floor.
On Thursday, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, had said she did not know for sure, but was worried that Republicans were planning not to return in October.
She told reporters, "I want you to know the Democrats stand ready to be here for as long as it takes to pass a jobs bill, to come to agreement on a budget bill, to avoid the sequester..." -- the scheduled cuts to defense and domestic spending set for Jan. 2.
"Unfortunately, the Do Nothing Congress wants to go home," Pelosi said.
"Instead of leaving town for seven weeks after being gone for four or five weeks [this summer], let's work across the aisle to restore fiscal responsibility, put people to work, and strengthen the middle class. We absolutely have to do that for the American people," she said.
Spent Nuclear Fuel: Accumulating Quantities at Commercial Reactors Present Storage and Other Challenges GAO Report Dated August 15, 2012; Released September 14, 2012 The amount of spent fuel stored on-site at commercial nuclear reactors will continue to accumulate--increasing by about 2,000 metric tons per year and likely more than doubling to about 140,000 metric tons--before it can be moved off-site, because storage or disposal facilities may take decades to develop. In examining centralized storage or permanent disposal options, GAO found that new facilities may take from 15 to 40 years before they are ready to begin accepting spent fuel. Once an off-site facility is available, it will take several more decades to ship spent fuel to that facility. This situation will be challenging because by about 2040 most currently operating reactors will have ceased operations, and options for managing spent fuel, if needed to meet transportation, storage, or disposal requirements, may be limited.
Studies show that the key risk posed by spent nuclear fuel involves a release of radiation that could harm human health or the environment. The highest consequence event posing such a risk would be a self-sustaining fire in a drained or partially drained spent fuel pool, resulting in a severe widespread release of radiation. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which regulates the nation's spent nuclear fuel, considers the probability of such an event to be low. According to studies GAO reviewed, the probability of such a fire is difficult to quantify because of the variables affecting whether a fire starts and spreads. Studies show that this low-probability scenario could have high consequences, however, depending on the severity of the radiation release. These consequences include widespread contamination, a significant increase in the probability of fatal cancer in the affected population, and the possibility of early fatalities. According to studies and NRC officials, mitigating procedures, such as replacement water to respond to a loss of pool water from an accident or attack, could help prevent a fire. Because a decision on a permanent means of disposing of spent fuel may not be made for years, NRC officials and others may need to make interim decisions, which could be informed by past studies on stored spent fuel. In response to GAO requests, however, NRC could not easily identify, locate, or access studies it had conducted or commissioned because it does not have an agencywide mechanism to ensure that it can identify and locate such classified studies. As a result, GAO had to take a number of steps to identify pertinent studies, including interviewing numerous officials.
Transferring spent fuel from wet to dry storage offers several key benefits, including safely storing spent fuel for decades after nuclear reactors retire--until a permanent solution can be found--and reducing the potential consequences of a pool fire. Regarding challenges, transferring spent fuel from wet to dry storage is generally safe, but there are risks to moving it, and accelerating the transfer of spent fuel could increase those risks. In addition, operating activities, such as refueling, inspections, and maintenance, may limit the time frames available for transferring spent fuel from wet to dry storage. Once spent fuel is in dry storage, there are additional challenges, such as costs for repackaging should it be needed. Some industry representatives told GAO that they question whether the cost of overcoming the challenges of accelerating the transfer from wet to dry storage is worth the benefit, particularly considering the low probability of a catastrophic release of radiation. NRC stated that spent fuel is safe in both wet and dry storage and that accelerating transfer is not necessary given the small increase in safety that could be achieved.
SRS restarts facilities to clean, dispose of contaminated salt The Times and Democrat September 17, 2012 AIKEN - The Saltstone Facilities at the Savannah River Site have restarted operations following a nine-month planned improvement outage.
The facilities process and dispose of previously contaminated salt solution, reducing environmental risk.
Improvements to the facilities are expected to provide a new and more reliable system to process larger amounts of decontaminated salt solution needed for future tank closure operations, according to Steve Wilkerson, Savannah River Remediation waste treatment manager.
"We expect the Saltstone Facilities to be even more robust as we position the site for continued success in closing waste tanks," Wilkerson said. "The improvements will support a 24/7 work schedule, which will be necessary when the Salt Waste Processing Facility begins operations."
The improvement outage, called Enhanced Low Activity Waste Disposal, began in December 2011 and culminated when the facility processed nearly 1.5 million gallons of waste. Since beginning operations in June 1990, Saltstone has processed more than 10 million gallons of low-level salt waste. For fiscal year 2012, which ends this month, the improved facilities will process more than 800,000 gallons of salt waste.
Flood Threat To Nuclear Plants Covered Up By Regulators, NRC Whistleblower Claims
Tom Zeller Jr., The Huffington Post September 14, 2012 In a letter submitted Friday afternoon to internal investigators at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a whistleblower engineer within the agency accused regulators of deliberately covering up information relating to the vulnerability of U.S. nuclear power facilities that sit downstream from large dams and reservoirs.
The letter also accuses the agency of failing to act to correct these vulnerabilities despite being aware of the risks for years.
These charges were echoed in separate conversations with another risk engineer inside the agency who suggested that the vulnerability at one plant in particular -- the three-reactor Oconee Nuclear Station near Seneca, S.C. -- put it at risk of a flood and subsequent systems failure, should an upstream dam completely fail, that would be similar to the tsunami that hobbled the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility in Japan last year. That event caused multiple reactor meltdowns.
In the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Huffington Post, Richard H. Perkins, a reliability and risk engineer with the agency's division of risk analysis, alleged that NRC officials falsely invoked security concerns in redacting large portions of a report detailing the agency's preliminary investigation into the potential for dangerous and damaging flooding at U.S. nuclear power plants due to upstream dam failure.
Perkins, along with at least one other employee inside NRC, also an engineer, suggested that the real motive for redacting certain information was to prevent the public from learning the full extent of these vulnerabilities, and to obscure just how much the NRC has known about the problem, and for how long.
"What I've seen," Perkins said in a phone call, "is that the NRC is really struggling to come up with logic that allows this information to be withheld."
Perkins was the lead author of the report, which was completed in July of 2011 -- roughly four months after an earthquake and subsequent tsunami flooded the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan, cut off electric power to the facility and disabled all of its backup power systems, eliminating the ability to keep the reactors cool and leading to a meltdown.
In addition to the Oconee facility, the report examined similar vulnerabilities at the Ft. Calhoun station in Nebraska, the Prairie Island facility in Minnesota and the Watts Bar plant in Tennessee, among others.
The report concluded, among other things, that the failure of one or more dams sitting upstream from several nuclear power plants "may result in flood levels at a site that render essential safety systems inoperable." High floodwaters could conceivably undermine all available power sources, the report found, including grid power, emergency diesel backup generators, and ultimately battery backups. The risk of these things happening, the report said, is higher than acceptable.
"The totality of information analyzed in this report suggests that external flooding due to upstream dam failure poses a larger than expected risk to plants and public safety," Perkins's report concluded, adding that the evidence warranted a more formal investigation.
In response to the report, the NRC launched an expanded investigation, which is ongoing. It also folded the dam failure issue into the slate of post-Fukushima improvements recommended by a special task force formed in the aftermath of that disaster. But in a press release dated March 6 of this year, the agency said the report "did not identify any immediate safety concerns."
The NRC made a heavily redacted copy of the report publicly available on the NRC website the same day.
"Nuclear power plant designs include protection against serious but very rare flooding events, including flooding from dam failure scenarios," the agency release noted. "Dam failures can occur as a consequence of earthquakes, overflow, and other mechanisms such as internal erosion and operational failures. A dam failure could potentially cause flooding at a nuclear power plant site depending on a number of factors including the location of the dam, reservoir volume, dam properties, flood routing, and site characteristics."
At the time of the report's public release, the agency was also weighing a response to a Freedom of Information Act request for related documents from a reporter with the Cascadia Times of Portland, Ore. Two months ago, the agency responded in part to that request by issuing another, similarly redacted version of the report, which was also published at the NRC website.
In justifying the redactions, the agency argued, among other things, that the report contained propriety commercial information, that release of the redacted information would "harm an identifiable private or governmental interest," and that "disclosure could reasonably be expected to endanger the life or physical safety of an individual."
In his letter to the NRC's inspector general, however, Perkins argued that these justifications were invalid.
"The Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff may be motivated to prevent the disclosure of this safety information to the public because it will embarrass the agency," Perkins wrote in his letter. "The redacted information includes discussion of, and excerpts from, NRC official agency records that show the NRC has been in possession of relevant, notable, and derogatory safety information for an extended period but failed to properly act on it. Concurrently, the NRC concealed the information from the public."
In a conversation with The Huffington Post, Perkins elaborated on the redacted material. "My estimation is that if people saw the information that we have, and if they knew for how long we've had it, some might be disappointed at how long it's taken to act, and some might be disappointed that, to date, we haven't really acted at all."
The agency acknowledged in its March 6 release that the issue relating to upstream dams "came to the staff's attention long before the current interest in natural disasters raised by the Japan earthquake/tsunami and reactor accident." But, the release added, "new sources of information on this issue have accumulated over the past few years. This information includes inspections of flood protection and related procedures, as well as recent re-evaluations of dam failure frequencies and possible flood heights at some U.S. nuclear power plants, suggesting that flooding effects in some cases may be greater than previously expected."
As for the redactions and Perkins's formal complaint, Eliot Brenner, a spokesman for the NRC, said he could not comment on complaints submitted to, or investigations undertaken by the agency's inspector general. But in an email message, Brenner pointed out that "the NRC coordinated with the Department of Homeland Security, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and U.S Army Corps of Engineers on necessary redactions" in the report.
A second risk engineer at NRC who is familiar with the unredacted report, and who requested anonymity for concern over reprisals at the agency, told The Huffington Post that the Department of Homeland Security, for its part, had signed-off on releasing the report without redactions. This, the engineer said, undermines arguments made by some agency officials that certain information should be withheld because the upstream dam vulnerability could be exploited by terrorists, who might target dams in order to precipitate a flood and subsequent meltdown at a downstream nuclear facility.
If this were truly such a security concern, however, it would be incumbent on the agency to act swiftly to eliminate that threat, the engineer stated. As it is, the engineer suggested, no increased security actions have been undertaken.
Meanwhile, the engineer is among several nuclear experts who remain particularly concerned about the Oconee plant in South Carolina, which sits on Lake Keowee, 11 miles downstream from the Jocassee Reservoir. Among the redacted findings in the July 2011 report -- and what has been known at the NRC for years, the engineer said -- is that the Oconee facility, which is operated by Duke Energy, would suffer almost certain core damage if the Jocassee dam were to fail. And the odds of it failing sometime over the next 20 years, the engineer said, are far greater than the odds of a freak tsunami taking out the defenses of a nuclear plant in Japan.
"The probability of Jocassee Dam catastrophically failing is hundreds of times greater than a 51 foot wall of water hitting Fukushima Daiichi," the engineer said. "And, like the tsunami in Japan, the man‐made 'tsunami' resulting from the failure of the Jocassee Dam will -- with absolute certainty -- result in the failure of three reactor plants along with their containment structures.
"Although it is not a given that Jocassee Dam will fail in the next 20 years," the engineer added, "it is a given that if it does fail, the three reactor plants will melt down and release their radionuclides into the environment."
David Lochbaum, a nuclear expert with the Union of Concerned Scientists, said a key concern was that the NRC has failed to appreciate and tackle this risk for so long. "NRC can, or may, resolve the flooding issues," Lochbaum said. "But if it doesn't step back and review when those problems could have been exposed sooner, it won't make the programmatic fixes needed to become a more effective regulator.
"Absent these steps and fixes, it's like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football Lucy is holding on the ground," Lochbaum added. "NRC will continue missing opportunities just like Charlie keeps missing that football." |
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