Nuclear Weapons

The Energy Department (DOE) is responsible for managing the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile, including providing tritium, a gas used to enhance the explosive power of nuclear weapons in the nation's stockpile. Because tritium decays, it has to be periodically replaced in weapons, but DOE has not produced tritium since 1988 and currently has no production capacity. DOE is using tritium removed from dismantled weapons to replace decayed tritium in active weapons. That supply is limited, however, and new tritium capacity will be needed by 2005. DOE plans to build a tritium extraction facility at its Savannah River Site in South Carolina. The $383 million project is scheduled for completion in 2005. During 1997, DOE completed the project's conceptual design report and began the preliminary design for the project. Three different teams reviewed the conceptual design and related documents. This report provides information on (1) the major comments raised by the three reviews and (2) the process used by DOE to respond to those comments.

GAO noted that: (1) two of the teams that reviewed the Tritium Extraction Facility's conceptual design found the project's scope, cost, and schedule to be appropriate and found no issues that would necessitate reevaluating the project; (2) the third team made no overall comments on the project; (3) the three teams also had nearly 800 specific comments; (4) comments that the review teams considered to be significant related to: (a) the design of the remote handling and tritium extraction processes; (b) the need for the project's schedule to allow for contingencies that could occur in the process and equipment development; and (c) the adequacy of the level of detail in the conceptual design report; (5) DOE handled each review team's specific comments differently; (6) for one team, the Savannah River Project Office prepared a response to each comment, and DOE headquarters had three members of the original review team comment on the adequacy of the responses; (7) for comments made by the second team, the Project Office responded to all comments, but did not seek the team's review of the responses; (8) for the third review team's comments, DOE responded to each comment, but the design team has not yet reviewed the responses; (9) overall, DOE made many changes to the conceptual design because of the review teams' comments and appears to have been generally responsive to the comments; (10) however, some comments--such as the one related to a need to include contingencies in the projects' schedule--have not been resolved to the satisfaction of the review teams; and (11) nonetheless, DOE approved the conceptual design report and the project entered the preliminary design phase in October 1997.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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