Tritium, which makes possible smaller, more powerful nuclear weapons, decays at a rate of 5.5 percent per year. Therefore, for nuclear weapons to be capable of operating as designed, the tritium in the weapons must be periodically replaced. DOE used to produce new tritium in its reactors at the Savannah River Site, but the last of these reactors was shut down in 1988 because of safety and operational problems. DOE currently has no tritium production capability, although the Department has been able to meet its requirements for tritium by reusing material recovered from dismantled weapons. In order to meet currently planned requirements for tritium, a new production capability must be available in 2005. To accomplish this, DOE is pursuing a dual-track program to select the primary production source. The first track is based on using a commercial light water reactor to produce tritium. Target rods containing lithium would be placed in the reactor, and during the reactor’s normal operations, some of the lithium would be turned into tritium. Once removed from the reactor, the target rods would be transported to the Tritium Extraction Facility, where the tritium would be removed. The second track involves building an accelerator as the primary producer of tritium. This device accelerates protons (particles within an atom that have a positive electrical charge) to nearly the speed of light. The protons are crashed into tungsten, releasing neutrons (particles within an atom that have no electrical charge), which can be used to change helium into tritium. As currently envisioned, this process would not involve the Tritium Extraction Facility. DOE’s current plan is to choose one of the two tracks in late 1998. If the commercial-light-water-reactor track is chosen, the accelerator will be pursued to the point of establishing an engineering design for it, but it will not be built. If the accelerator track is chosen, the accelerator will be built and operated and, as a backup, all aspects of the commercial light water reactor option will be completed—with the exception of the actual production of tritium. The target rods will be produced, agreements with utilities for the use of their reactors will be signed, and the Tritium Extraction Facility will be built. Thus, under both tracks, DOE intends to build the Tritium Extraction Facility. Construction of the facility—to be managed by the Commercial Light Water Reactor Project Office at the Savannah River Site—is currently estimated to cost $383.4 million and is scheduled for completion in 2005. The Tritium Extraction Facility project completed the conceptual design phase in October 1997. The preliminary design, currently being developed, is scheduled to be completed in June 1998. The conceptual design for the Tritium Extraction Facility was reviewed by three teams—the “Red Team,” the “Independent Review Team,” and the “Formal Design Review Team.” Although there is no requirement for such reviews, they were requested by DOE headquarters’ Office of Commercial Light Water Reactor Production and the Project Office at Savannah River to increase their confidence in the conceptual design of the facility before proceeding to the preliminary design phase. All teams reviewed drafts of the conceptual design and/or the conceptual design report. Table 1 shows how many and what type of participants each team had, what the team was chartered to do, and when the review was performed. Two of the three teams that reviewed DOE’s conceptual design for the Tritium Extraction Facility made overall comments in their final reports. The Red Team and the Formal Design Review Team expressed a favorable opinion overall of the facility’s design and the related documentation. According to the Red Team, the conceptual design’s scope, cost, and schedule are appropriate; the technical concept and approach are sound; all major risks have been identified; and the building is constructible and, in general, appears to comply with DOE’s current requirements. The Formal Design Review Team reported that it did not identify any significant items that could not be corrected with three documents due to be completed after the team’s review—the Facility Design Description, the System Design Description, and the Conceptual Design Statement of Work. The Independent Review Team did not make any overall comments on the conceptual design. In addition to the overall comments made by two of the review teams, all three teams made a number of specific comments. The Red Team had 34 comments (see app. I for a listing of the Red Team’s major comments), and the Independent Review Team had 60 comments (see app. II for a listing of the Independent Review Team’s major comments). The Formal Design Review Team made 691 specific documentary and technical comments on the conceptual design and related documents—none of which it considered to be major impediments to the design and construction of the Tritium Extraction Facility. The specific comments made by all three review teams covered a wide range of topics, including the design of specific systems, the design and construction schedule, life-cycle costs, the method of contracting for the design and construction, and the level of detail in the supporting documentation and in the conceptual design report. Comments that the review teams considered to be significant and that we believe cover issues that could affect the success of the project related to the design of the remote handling and tritium extraction processes, the need to include contingencies in the schedule, and the level of detail in the conceptual design report. The remote handling system for the Tritium Extraction Facility, the means by which nearly all facility processes and maintenance, including moving tritium target rods and opening them, will be controlled from a separate (remote) room. The extraction process involves heating the target rods in a furnace and removing the tritium and other gases from them. Project officials do not consider design and construction of these systems to be high-risk, but they do believe that they are the highest-risk tasks involved in the project. The Red Team reported that the remote handling and tritium extraction processes include risks that need to be addressed in the near term. The team found that a plan to mitigate the risks was not evident and that the subsystems to manipulate and open the target rods had not been demonstrated. The team believed that the time and cost to engineer and develop the processes would be greater than the estimates in the conceptual design report. Similarly, in a comment it deemed “significant,” the Independent Review Team stated that the target rod handling process was overly complex. The team proposed an alternative method and suggested that it be discussed in the conceptual design report. The Red Team and the Independent Review Team consider DOE’s actions and responses to the comments on the remote handling and tritium extraction processes to be generally adequate. According to Red Team members and the chairman of the Independent Review Team, much has changed since their reviews were conducted. Design alternatives have been developed and changes have been made in the conceptual design report that have satisfied the intent of the comments. The Independent Review Team indicated a need to consider contingencies, to provide allowances for unforeseen delays, in the schedule—just as they are addressed in cost estimates. The chairman of the team told us that it was specifically concerned with the plans for a mock-up of the remote handling process and a prototype of the tritium extraction furnace—believing that any problems with them could delay the project overall because the tasks run concurrently with the development of the detailed design. The chairman explained that although the conceptual design report now contains more detail on the project’s schedule, it still does not include contingencies. Because he believes this feature to be very important, he considers DOE’s response to this comment to be inadequate. DOE officials informed us that they believe there is no need for the schedule to include contingencies. The Tritium Extraction Facility’s schedule is based on a 5 day per week, 8 hour per day work schedule. The option of working multiple shifts and/or weekends, as necessary, offers adequate flexibility to respond to schedule issues. All three review teams made numerous comments suggesting adding additional information and detail to the conceptual design report and related documents. The suggestions concerned requirements, design detail, equipment, analyses, schedules, risks, and planned operations. The Red Team concluded that the conceptual design package was insufficient to permit an architect engineering firm to independently proceed with the preliminary design. Since the three teams reviewed the draft conceptual design, the Project Office has provided considerable additional information in the issued conceptual design report. Furthermore, according to program officials, DOE never intended for an architect engineering firm to develop the preliminary design independently, but rather for the firm to work with the Project Office to develop the design. After reviewing the final conceptual design report, the Red Team and the chairman of the Independent Review Team consider their comments about the level of detail to be resolved. The Formal Design Review Team has yet to review DOE’s actions subsequent to its review. Although one of the review teams was chartered by DOE headquarters and two were chartered by the Savannah River Project Office, the purpose of obtaining the independent reviews of the conceptual design was similar in all three cases—to provide confidence in the adequacy of the Tritium Extraction Facility’s conceptual design. Nevertheless, there were no uniform guidelines established for these reviews, and the comments made by each of the review teams were handled differently. In addition, DOE and the Project Office did not reach closure with any of the review teams prior to initiating the preliminary design phase. Neither DOE nor the Project Office at the Savannah River Site initially responded to all of the Red Team’s comments. In April 1997, on the basis of a briefing provided by the Red Team, DOE headquarters selected 10 items that it believed to be most important and that required action before the beginning of the preliminary design phase.