Annual DoE Report Cards for Nuke Site Contractors Detail Delays, Accomplishments COVID Pressure Nationwide

Below is a digest of the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) performance evaluation summaries: the agency’s report cards for its big contracts, which explain how much management and operations entities earned for their performance managing nuclear-weapon sites.

The digest includes links to NNSA source documents.

For fiscal year 2021, which began Oct. 1, 2020 and ran through Sept. 30, 2021, all the NNSA’s contractors were charged with keeping workplaces open and safe for mission-essential personnel during the first full fiscal year of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The agency recognized all of its contractors for operating under COVID safety protocols and praised many for acting quickly to put those protocols in place even before the widespread availability of vaccines.

In the reviews, the NNSA acknowledged cost and schedule problems for several major programs, including the W80-4 cruise-missile warhead life-extension program at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, uranium processing upgrades at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., the dilute-and-dispose plutonium-elimination program at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., and the U1a Complex Enhancements Project at the Nevada National Security Site, which is mining out more underground space for the non-yield-producing tests needed to assess the reliability of U.S. nuclear weapons in the coming decades.

Kansas City National Security Campus, Kansas City, Mo. Honeywell Federal Manufacturing & Technology.

• Total fee earned for fiscal 2021: $61.7 million of a possible $67.2 million, including $22.4 million worth of fixed fees.
• Total award fee (at-risk) fee earned: $39.2 million, or 88% of the available total. 
• Overall adjectival rating was “very good:” “exceeding many of the objectives and key outcomes … meeting overall cost, schedule, and technical performance requirements with accomplishments that greatly outweigh issues.”
• Fiscal year 2021 was the second of five one-year options left on the contract. Three one-year options remain. 

• Completed first production unit components for B61-12 gravity bomb and W88 Alt-370 submarine-launched ballistic missile on or ahead of schedule (each weapon reached its system first production unit in calendar year 2021). Completed the first production unit of a major W87 component.

• Expansion of site’s manufacturing footprint is going slower than hoped. Also, the prime “[l]acked clear oversight of cost estimating practices, procurement and production execution projections which caused material impacts on programmatic schedules and costs.”

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, Calif., Lawrence Livermore National Security (University of California and Bechtel National, with AECOM and BWX Technologies).

• Total fee earned for fiscal 2021: $62.3 million of a possible $67.2 million, including $26 million worth of fixed fees.
• Total award fee (at risk) earned: $37.4 million, or about 91% of the total available. 
• Overall adjectival was “very good:” “exceeding many of the objectives and key outcomes … meeting overall cost, schedule, and technical performance requirements with accomplishments that greatly outweigh issues.”
• The prime earned its final available one-year incentive term, clinching labs ops through fiscal year 2026 and maxing out the options on its contract.

• National Ignition Facility, the fusion-energy research center and nuclear weapons evaluation hub, had its highest yield to date.

• “Schedules are starting to slip” on the W80-4 cruise-missile warhead life-extension and W87-1 intercontinental ballistic missile warhead life-extension. “Staffing issues could impact program schedules and deliverables” for these programs.

Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, N.M. Triad National Security (University of California, Battelle Memorial Institute, Texas A&M University, with industry subcontractors Fluor Corp. and Huntington Ingalls). 

• Total fee earned for fiscal 2021: $46.7 million of a possible $50 million, including $24 million worth of fixed fees.
• Total award fee (at risk) earned: $26.1 million, or about 87% of the total available.
• Overall adjectival rating was “very good:” “exceeding many of the objectives and key outcomes … meeting overall cost, schedule, and technical performance requirements with accomplishments that outweigh issues.”
• 2021 was the third year of the contract’s five-year base.

• Finished the Red Sage Nightshade series subcritical fissile material tests in Nevada; made advances in plutonium pit production processes.

• Struggled with some production activities. Did not produce the targeted amount of plutonium oxide for the dilute and dispose plutonium elimination program with the Savannah River Site. 

Nevada National Security Site, Mission Support and Test Services (Honeywell International, with Jacobs, and Stoller Newport News Nuclear). 

• Total fee earned for fiscal 2021: $25.5 million of a possible $26.6 million, including $2.2 million worth of fixed fees.
• Total award fee (at risk) earned: $21.3 million or about 87% of total available. 
• Adjectival rating was: “very good:” “exceeding many of the objectives and key outcomes … meeting overall cost, schedule, and technical performance requirements with accomplishments that greatly outweigh issues.”
• 2021 was the fifth year of the contract’s five-year base. Five options remain, the first of which is a 10-month option, the last of which is a 14-month option, and the remaining three of which are one-year options.

• Supported four subcritical experiment series “simultaneously,” including three experiments in one year. Executed nine experiments at the  Joint Actinide Shock Physics Experimental Research (JASPER) facility, which simulates some effects of a nuclear detonation without a yield.

• The larger of two subprojects aimed at expanding the site’s underground subcritical testing laboratories is “over budget and behind schedule.”

NNSA Production Office. Pantex Plant, Amarillo, Texas, and Y-12 National Security Complex, Oak Ridge, Tenn. Consolidated Nuclear Security (Bechtel National, with Leidos, Northrop Grumman, and SOC).

• Total fee earned for fiscal 2021: $36 million of a possible $41.6 million, including $1.6 million worth of fixed fees.
• Total award fee (at risk) earned: $34.3 million of about 86% of the total available. 
• Adjectival rating was “very good:” “exceeding many of the objectives and key outcomes … meeting overall cost, schedule, and technical performance requirements with accomplishments that greatly outweigh issues.”
• The contract was set to expire after March. 31, 2022, but the NNSA was preparing to extend the deal for at least six months and possibly as long as one year while the agency evaluates a complaint about the award in November 2021 of a follow-on contract that would cover up to the next decade of management at Pantex and Y-12. After the eventual transition to a new contractor, CNS was scheduled to remain at Y-12 to continue building the Uranium Processing Facility, scheduled to be completed by December 2025.

• Completed ahead of schedule the first production unit of the Navy’s W88 Alt-370 submarine-launched ballistic missile warhead. Restarted Y-12 waste shipments to the Nevada National Security Site in May after a roughly three-year pause.

• Missed W88 ALT 370 baseline, which was 75% complete at the end of fiscal year 2021 on Sept. 30, 2021. Direct Chip Melt Projects, uranium reclamation equipment intended to streamline production of nuclear-weapon components, “did not meet performance milestones.” Generally, “CNS project performance did not meet expectations and is challenged by a large portfolio.”

Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif. National Technology and Engineering Solutions of Sandia (wholly owned Honeywell International subsidiary).

• Total fee earned for fiscal 2021: $38.9 million of a possible $40 million, including $31.5 million worth of fixed fees.
• Total award fee earned: $7.4 million, or 86.4% of total available.
• Adjectival rating was “very good:” “exceeding many of the objectives and key outcomes … meeting overall cost, schedule, and technical performance requirements with accomplishments that greatly outweigh issues.”
• 2021 was the fourth year of the contract’s five-year base.

• Contributed to an early finish for the W88 Alt-370’s Mark 5 Reentry Body Assembly First Production Unit through “timely evaluation and disposition” of concerns about production of the weapon’s arming, fuzing and firing assembly: one of the major subsystems refreshed as part of the Alt-370 refurbishment.

• “Delayed critical W80-4 system-level testing activities due to component-level design, integration, and testing issues, increasing risk to meeting program system deliverables.”

Savannah River Site, Aiken, S.C. Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (Fluor, with Honeywell International and Stoller Newport News Nuclear). 

• Total award fee earned for NNSA work in fiscal 2021: $34.8 million, or 88.7% of the total available. There is no fixed fee for the contractor’s NNSA’s work at the site. 
• Adjectival rating was “very good:” “exceeding many of the objectives and key outcomes … meeting overall cost, schedule, and technical performance requirements with accomplishments that greatly outweigh issues.”
• DOE’s Office of Environmental Management owns the contract. The office in 2021 canceled a competition for a follow-on contract and had yet to start a new competition as of Feb. 11. The incumbent’s deal expires Sept. 30. 

• Though the planned pit plant at the Savannah River Site will not begin production of fissile primary-stage cores in 2030 as NNSA hoped, the site’s early cost and schedule estimate, the range formally called CD-1, was approved in June 2021 by agency headquarters and “was acknowledged as one of the best Major System CD-1 submittals ever assembled.”

• The Surplus Plutonium Disposition Project Performance, the dilute-and-dispose program aimed at getting rid of surplus weapon-usable plutonium by burying it at DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, “is over budget and behind schedule due to quality issues related to design.”