A trio of advocacy groups asked the Department of Energy and the Pentagon to provide a little budget bump for three National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)-funded optics facilities across the country, including one in Rochester, N.Y., the Donald Trump administration tried to cancel last year.
In a letter last week, the groups urged Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Defense Secretary James Mattis to seek $565 million for the NNSA Inertial Confinement Fusion Program (ICF) in fiscal 2020: roughly 3 percent more than the programs received in its current budget and nearly 35 percent more than the Trump administration sought.
Signing the letter were the Advanced Nuclear Weapons Alliance; SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics; and the Optical Society. The first is a year-old Washington, D.C.-based organization advocating for modernizing all aspects of the nuclear security enterprise; the latter two are older professional associations and advocacy groups for scientists whose research often involves lasers.
A member of one of the groups, speaking on background, said they were unaware of any White House plan to propose funding cuts for these facilities in the next budget, and that the letter was only a “reminder of what the three entities require in 2020.”
The ICF program encompasses three major NNSA-funded laser research facilities: the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif.; the Z Pulsed Power Facility at the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M.; and the OMEGA Laser Facility at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics at the University of Rochester in Rochester, N.Y.
“Effective stockpile stewardship requires ongoing funding and maintenance of all three major, world-leading ICF facilities,” the advocacy groups stated in their letter.
The Trump administration wanted to cut all funding for OMEGA in fiscal 2019 “as part of rebalancing the ICF Program to strengthen long-term support for SSP [stockpile stewardship program] efforts,” according to the White House budget request.
Congress was a hard “no” on that plan. The House proposed $68 million for OMEGA, while the Senate called for $80 million. The upper chamber, including Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), threw its weight behind OMEGA in conference negotiations late this summer, and the NNSA’s final 2019 budget provided $80 million for the facility.
To help ensure the U.S. nuclear deterrent functions, the NNSA uses its major laser research facilities to simulate some of the conditions that otherwise could only be produced by nuclear explosive tests — a sort of test U.S. has not conducted since the early 1990s, and which it plans to do without for the foreseeable future.
Such tests, along with hands-on work maintaining and refurbishing U.S. nuclear weapons, are the red meat of the NNSA’s national security mission. The nonexplosive tests are also an increasingly important pipeline for attracting top-shelf scientists willing to spend their careers ensuring that U.S. nuclear weapons will function as intended — a task that could one day fall entirely to people who have never detonated a nuclear weapon planned for field deployment.
Federal agencies typically submit their first-draft budget requests for the coming fiscal year to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget some time after Labor Day. The White House usually sends feedback to the agencies around Thanksgiving, a move informally called a pass back. After a little more back and forth between the White House and the agencies, the administration rolls out its formal budget request to Congress in early February.
