The U.S. Air Force “underestimated” the complexity of building a sprawling network of launch centers and other ground infrastructure for its next nuclear missile. This led to severe projected cost overruns, the service’s acquisition chief said Wednesday.
     Most of the Air Force’s and industry’s attention was initially focused on the missile portion of the LGM-35A Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile. Andrew Hunter is the Air Force’s assistant secretary for acquisition, technology and logistics. He said at the Defense News Conference in Arlington, Virginia, on Wednesday that the Air Force “really neglected the complexity of the ground infrastructure.”
     The Air Force wants to replace its arsenal of four hundred and fifty ageing Minuteman III nuclear missiles. The Minuteman III program is nearing the end of its life, with the Northrop Grumman-made Sentinel. Sentinel’s replacement includes building new launch control centers across the Plains region, refurbishing existing silos for the new missiles and replacing about seventy-five hundred miles of copper cable connecting the facilities with modern fiber optics. The projected future costs of have skyrocketed.
     The Pentagon originally expected to spend seventy-seven billion seven hundred million dollars on Sentinel. However, the program is now likely to cost about one hundred and sixty billion dollars if it stays on its current course. The projected cost overruns alarmed lawmakers and Pentagon officials and triggered an event known as a critical Nunn-McCurdy breach.
     After a review announced in July, the military decided that the Sentinel was too important to cancel but must be restructured to bring those costs back down. But the Pentagon said even a “reasonably modified” version would still probably cost one hundred and forty billion dollars which amounts to an eighty-one percent more than the original estimate.
     Jim Slife is the Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force. He said that the Air Force is now going “line by line” through Sentinel’s funding requirements to look for places to reduce its costs. He added that the “exhaustive” process will take months.
     Slife said, “The undersecretary (Melissa Dalton), Mr. Hunter’s team and I are deeply, deeply involved in looking at our requirements (and) making sure that we revalidate all the requirements.” The Air Force needs to “trace every single one of them back to either presidential guidance, or departmental guidance for things like safety, security, surety, survivability — all the things that are needed in a system that you’re going to rely on to keep the nation safe. Slife added that finding places to cut costs is challenging. Sentinel’s top-level requirements were fairly straightforward.
     Silfe continued that the “derived requirements” that spell out how Sentinel will do its job “actually can become problematic.” Those can include spelling out how many facilities will be needed to carry out Sentinel’s mission and how much concrete those facilities will need to consume and how large a workforce they will require.
    The Air Force has not constructed a new ICBM and accompanying infrastructure since the Minuteman III which was deployed in the early 1970s.And because it has been so long since the Air Force undertook a major acquisition of this scale, Hunter said, the Air Force underestimated Sentinel’s complexity. “We’re having to relearn some of those skills and up our game.” The “striking” complexity of Sentinel’s ground infrastructure is crucial to making the ICBM system an effective nuclear deterrent.
     Hunter added that “We have to have a missile where we can respond instantly, at all times, without fail, and in the context of the highest of high-intensity conflicts, a potential nuclear exchange. And we ask our ground infrastructure to provide most of those capabilities. The missile is only a small piece of that puzzle.” The Air Force also has to “bring a lot more engineering focus on the ground infrastructure” to simplify Sentinel and bring its costs under control.

Ambient office = 100 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 98 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 98 nanosieverts per hour

Avocado from Central Market = 115 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 100 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 87 nanosieverts per hour

     Brazilian fuel cycle company Indústrias Nucleares do Brasil (INB) has announced that it will resume exploration for uranium in the country after a forty-year hiatus.
     INB has launched the Uranium Prospecting and Mining Partnership Program. It is seeking to work in partnership with companies in the mining sector. INB said new research will be conducted in areas known for their “great mineral potential for this valuable substance”.
     Adauto Seixas is the INB President. He said, “This new round of research comes at an important time for the country, since national production is still lower than the domestic consumption of the Angra I and II nuclear plants, and taking into account the increase in demand with the completion of Angra III.”
     INB mentioned that the price of uranium has more than tripled in recent years. This “brings an avenue of opportunities for growth in the sector in the form of exporting concentrated uranium, and also with the possibility of offering nuclear fuel to the international market, adding value to the local production chain”.
     INB added that “According to a study conducted forty years ago, Brazil had the eighth largest reserve in the world. However, considering that the second largest reserve is in Kazakhstan, which is the same size as the state of Rio de Janeiro, it is possible that the country could eventually take second place.”
     According to World Nuclear Association (WNA), exploration in the 1970s and 1980s indicated that Brazil has reasonably assured resources of two hundred and ten thousand tons of uranium. There has been little investment in exploration since the mid-1980s.
    The country has three main deposits. Pocos de Caldas in Minas Gerais state, where a uranium mine was closed in 1997; Lagoa Real or Caetité in Bahia state which has been operating since 1999; and Itataia, which is now called Santa Quitéria, in Ceará state, where the production of uranium as a co-product with phosphate is planned.
     Uranium has been mined in Brazil since 1982, but the only currently operating mine is INB’s Lagoa Real/Caetité mine, with a capacity of three hundred and forty tons of uranium per year. The mine has known resources of ten thousand tons of uranium at 0.3%U.
     INB began developing the adjacent Engenho mine in January 2017. It is a two hundred to three hundred tons of uranium per year open pit operation. Production was initially planned to begin in October of 2017, but has not yet begun.
     In January of 2020, the country’s energy minister stated that investment in INB would allow it to produce one hundred and fifty tons of uranium annually from Caetité, starting in 2020. Production would expand to three hundred and sixty tons of uranium per year by 2023. The Santa Quitéria Consortium is a partnership between INB and privately owned fertilizer producer Galvani. It expects to produce two thousand three hundred tons of uranium concentrate annually from the Itataia deposit.
     In 2022, Brazil produced forty-three tons of uranium. All mined uranium is used domestically, after it has been converted and enriched abroad. The country’s uranium consumption is currently about three hundred and thirty-nine tons of uranium per year.
     In December of 2022, INB signed a contract with Russia’s Rosatom for the supply of three hundred and thirty tons of uranium in the form of natural UF6 to fuel the Angra nuclear power plant from 2023 to 2027. In May of 2023, three contracts were signed with Westinghouse to cover the supply of advanced fuel assemblies to be used for Angra 1 reloads.

Ambient office = 131 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 92 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 90 nanosieverts per hour

Beefsteak tomato from Central Market = 143 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 102 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 87 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient office = 115 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 95 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 98 nanosieverts per hour

Avocado from Central Market = 65 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 93 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 80 nanosieverts per hour