“Another reason to cancel the Sentinel missile: the rising cost of its nuclear warhead” – at Savannah River Site & Los Alamos National Lab
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, by Stephen Young (Union of Concerned Scientists), May 23, 2024
As widely reported, the estimated cost for the Air Force’s new Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile recently rose dramatically, by 37 percent, to a total of almost $132 billion. This cost increase represents a breach of what is known as the Nunn-McCurdy Act, mandating an evaluation by the Pentagon of whether to go forward with the program. Less well known is that the effort to build new nuclear warheads, including one for the Sentinel missile, is also likely to cost far more than previously projected, with a critical element of the project potentially costing more than double earlier estimates.
Buried deep in the Energy Department’s Fiscal Year 2025 budget request is a new ballpark cost for a proposed production plant to make plutonium “pits,” the explosive core of nuclear weapons. The estimate for the plant rose dramatically, from $6.9-11.1 billion to $18-25 billion, an increase of up to 260 percent. On top of that, the budget request says the construction schedule–already years behind the initial goal–is expected to be delayed by another 1-3 years.
New plutonium pits are used to make new nuclear weapons, something the United States has not done since the early 1990s, when the Cold War ended. Congress has mandated that the United States make a minimum of 80 pits per year by 2030. That task falls to the National Nuclear Security Administration, the semi-autonomous agency in the Energy Department responsible for developing, maintaining and now manufacturing US nuclear weapons. Its leader, Jill Hruby, testified back in 2021 that the agency would not make the 2030 deadline, missing it by between two and five years.
full article: https://thebulletin.org/2024/05/another-reason-to-cancel-the-sentinel-missile-the-rising-cost-of-its-nuclear-warhead/