After years of cost overruns and design mistakes, the National Nuclear Security Administration plans to completely overhaul its approach to building a new facility for processing highly enriched uranium at the Y-12 site.
Newly appointed NNSA Administrator Frank Klotz told the Knoxville News Sentinel Wednesday that the agency concurs with the recommendations (.pdf) of a committee assembled to rethink the Uranium Processing Facility project in Oak Ridge, Tenn. To keep the project under $6.5 billion, the committee's six-week review recommended abandoning plans to relocate the uranium operations into a single large building. That approach was expected to cost $600 million in 2005, but budget projections have since increased to more than $10 billion, while an initial design for the facility was scrapped in 2012 for not having a tall enough roof.
Instead, the committee, known as the Red Team, recommended an approach that keeps many operations in renovated existing buildings. They would be supplemented by smaller new buildings designed to handle specific processing functions, not all of which would need the same level of costly security measures.