June 23, 2016

Management of Infrastructure at the Pantex Plant

The National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) Pantex Plant mission includes the manufacture of specialty explosives, fabrication, and testing of high explosive components, pit requalification and surveillance, and other activities.  The NNSA Production Office has the oversight responsibility for the work performed by Consolidated Nuclear Security LLC, the management and operating contractor at Pantex and NNSA’s Y-12 National Security Complex.

Pantex maintains 608 facilities, including 53 mission-critical facilities, which are primarily used to perform scientific, production, environmental restoration, or stockpile stewardship, and without which, operations would be disrupted or placed at risk.  According to Pantex officials, reduced maintenance budgets have created a large backlog of repairs needed to sustain the facilities and infrastructure.  In addition, fiscal year 2015 and out-year budgets continue to underfund Pantex requirements for infrastructure management.  For example, Pantex required $228.9 million to fund infrastructure in fiscal year 2015, but NNSA funded only $133.3 million.  According to the July 2013 Ten-Year Site Plan, these funding constraints have caused Pantex to focus resources on maintaining mission-critical facilities at the expense of the balance of plant facilities.

Although Pantex identified and determined the condition of its infrastructure, systems, and structures that were in need of repair, replacement, or demolition/disposal, its maintenance backlog reporting was inconsistent with Department Guide 433.1-1A, Nuclear Facility Maintenance Management Program Guide for Use with DOE O 433.1B. This resulted in a significant underreporting of its maintenance backlog.  Department Guide 433.1-1A defines backlogged maintenance as “work that is requested, but not complete (including periodic maintenance past its due date).”  However, we determined that the majority of the requested maintenance tasks at Pantex, although captured in the maintenance system, were not reported to NNSA management via performance metric reporting.  In the absence of complete backlog information, NNSA management does not have a true indicator of the site infrastructure’s overall condition.

Topic: Management & Administration