Task Force Calls for Weapons Lab Consolidation

A US Department of Energy task force has recommended in a report that the three DOE weapons laboratories be consolidated as part of a major restructuring of the US nuclear weapons program. The restructuring would also include the design of a new nuclear “reliable replacement warhead” that “should lead to a family of modern nuclear weapons.” The report was completed in July by the nuclear weapons complex infrastructure task force under the auspices of the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board.

Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman said in early September that he couldn’t comment on the specifics of the report until the end of the month, “but I have read the report and it is serious work by serious people and it makes significant recommendations that will have technical, engineering, and managerial impact.” The recommendation to consolidate the labs would be politically sensitive “with leaders in Congress who have an interest in particular labs,” he said. Any restructuring “will have to have the blessing of Congress.”

The report calls for the creation of a “consolidated nuclear production center,” to which much of the nuclear material currently at the weapons labs would be moved. The report criticizes the weapons labs—Los Alamos, Sandia, and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories—for consuming two-thirds of the nuclear weapons budget while they “routinely compete with each other and set their own requirements as justification for new facilities and redundant research funding in the fear that one laboratory may become superior.”

The report doesn’t specify how the labs should be consolidated, but concludes that “the status quo is neither technically credible, nor financially sustainable. Some action must be taken. The task force has proposed a path which … will require leadership and crisp decisions and must be molded to meet political and financial realities. The transformation should begin now.”

The task force was chaired by physicist David Overskei, president of the California-based Decision Factors Inc, a complex-systems management firm. Hermann Grunder, a retired director of both Argonne National Laboratory and Jefferson Lab, and John Crawford, former deputy laboratory director at Sandia, were also on the task force.