Notwithstanding President Donald Trump’s widely disputed tweet on Wednesday regarding the strength of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, plenty of work remains at the Energy Department facilities that support the nation’s deterrent.
My first order as President was to renovate and modernize our nuclear arsenal. It is now far stronger and more powerful than ever before….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 9, 2017
Today, DOE nuclear facilities and the arsenal they serve remain in the middle, rather than the end, of a modernization program started by the Barack Obama administration. The United States is also still working on the Nuclear Posture Review that Trump ordered in January, and which is expected to wrap up this year.
Modernization costs run into the hundreds of billions of dollars and, as the effort winds on, DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is grappling still with the evergreen issue of outmoded and excess facilities that sap money from active weapons programs, as well as the fallout of nuclear safety snafus at DOE’s prime plutonium production facility at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
The Trump administration thought it had a straightforward plan for the excess facilities: start transferring them in fiscal 2018 to DOE’s Office of Environmental Management for cleanup. The White House requested $225 million for that effort, but Congress came in much lower in a pair of appropriations bills that made it out of committee before the August recess. The House provided $75 million and the Senate only $55 million. The upper chamber’s proposed budget would cover the early stages of cleanup for facilities at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., and the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn. The House’s proposal would add some work at the Idaho National Laboratory.
Of more immediate import to nuclear materials is Los Alamos National Laboratory’s PF-4 plutonium production facility, which is central to the present and future strength of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. The facility ensures the pits — or cores — of nuclear weapons remain potent. However, violations of criticality safety rules prompted DOE to shut the facility down in 2013, in which state it remained until October 2016.
The PF-4 shutdown provoked some bad press in June that last week led Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) — ranking member on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee — to demand a long list of explanations from NNSA Administrator Frank Klotz.
After the 2013 incident and other high-profile safety lapses at the lab, the NNSA curtailed lab prime contractor’s Los Alamos National Security’s management contract. The agency released a draft request for proposals for the follow-on Los Alamos management contract in July. The final solicitation is expected in September.
So whatever the gauge of nuclear strength — total destructive potential of the arsenal’s fissile cores, raw numbers of missiles, the ability to hit the most sensitive targets — there is plenty of heavy lifting ahead before any weigh-in.
