Y-12 security breach update: Old nun awaits sentencing while costs of new Y-12 facility not to be released until 2015

Published just two months before the nun, the gardener, and the housepainter broke into Y-12, a 12 June 2012 report by the Department of Energy focused on the planning and design of the new facility to be built directly adjacent to HEUMF. The planning and designing of this new facility, the Uranium Processing Facility (UPF), was characterized as supporting a culture of complacency among and between private contractors and NNSA employees tasked with overseeing their work. Specifically, this culture of complacency thrived among employees of both private contractors and NNSA who were interviewed; employees frequently denied any individual or institutional responsibility for either or both public safety and security at the new UPF.

While a lone security guard was at first blamed and then fired for the security breach at Y-12, one of the two major security contractors was B&W Technical Services Y-12, LCC (B&W). Bechtel Corporation, although its name was rarely mentioned either after the breach at Y-12 or at the subsequent trial, is a major partner of B&W along with Babcock and Wilcox Company. 

B&W, including Bechtel, is also the contractor managing the UPF planning and design of the UPF. Only months after the breach at Y-12, B&W, including Bechtel, was awarded the contract to construct the new UPF after they complete the planning and design phases.

According to a recent GAO report, the cost of the UPF design and planning phases, “…has increased from approximately $1.1 billion in 2004 to $6.5 billion in 2012. The most recent design was jettisoned by B&W because it did not allow for the size of the equipment required. Under their revised design, the roof of the UPF had to be raised 13 feet. Additional design costs for the roof and other changes totaled $540 million. 

The projected costs for the delayed construction phase of the UPF are at this time both unclear and undefined. B&W Y-12 and Bechtel, the primary contractors awarded the recent construction bid for the UPF, are regulated by the NNSA. However, according to reporter Frank Munger at the Knoxville NewsSentinel , officials at the NNSA do not “… plan to reveal the price tag of the Uranium Processing Facility until October 2015.”

In summary, the same two business entities, Bechtel Corporation and Babcock and Wilcox Company, tasked with security at Y-12, a security system breached by an octogenarian nun and two other senior citizens, are also the same two business enterprises in charge of the planning and design of the new facility, UPF, to be built at Y-12 (estimated total security costs at Y-12 at the time of the breach in 2012 were $150 million). To date, costs for the planning and design of UPF have risen in 2012 to $6.5 billion from approximately $1.1 billion in 2004. Several months after the security breach at Y-12, these same two corporations, Bechtel Corporation and Babcock and Wilcox Company, were named as the primary construction contractors for UPF at Y-12. At this time the NNSA refuses to provide taxpayers with the construction costs of the UPF until 2015.  

Robert Lee Maril, a professor of Sociology at East Carolina University, is the author of The Fence: National Security, Public Safety, and Illegal Immigration along the U.S.-Mexico Border. He blogs at leemaril.com.