Tennessee uranium building to be redesigned

The National Nuclear Security Administration’s Uranium Processing Facility, already a poster child for nuclear weapons management problems, is apparently going to need a bigger poster. Frank Munger at the Knoxville News Sentinel is reporting this evening that NNSA officials admitted at a hearing today the design for the multi-billion dollar building will have to be changed:

At a federal safety board hearing today in Knoxville, officials at the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant acknowledged that the UPF will have to be redesigned because all the equipment needed to process bomb-grade uranium and conduct other related activities won’t fit into the 340,000-square-foot building as previously envisioned.

UPF, you will recall, got the funding nod in February from the Obama administration over a new plutonium building at Los Alamos after the federal government realized it didn’t have the money to build both over-budget, behind-schedule projects simultaneously.