A compromise version of the National Defense Authorization Act, passed Tuesday by the House and awaiting a vote in the Senate, would authorize funding for Department of Energy nuclear weapons programs at or above the requested level for fiscal year 2022.
The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), DOE’s semi-autonomous nuclear-weapons agency, would get $20.3 billion: half a billion dollars more than the roughly $19.7 billion requested, nearly all of which is for the Weapons Activities portfolio.
The biggest winners at NNSA would be the agency’s infrastructure and operations account, which funds upkeep of existing nuclear-weapons production infrastructure, and the the Uranium Processing Facility at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., which netted an authorization of $600 million, or $76 million above the request. The facility will support manufacture of nuclear-weapon secondary stages throughout the rest of this century.
Authorization bills set policy and spending limits for separate appropriations bills. As of Tuesday, the government was running on a continuing resolution that holds budgets at 2021 levels through Feb. 18. Neither of the 2022 draft appropriations bills produced this summer by the full House or the Senate Appropriations Committee would give the NNSA all the funding it would be authorized to spend if the latest NDAA becomes law.
The House and Senate Armed Services Committees did not differ greatly about their preferences for the NNSA in separate NDAA drafts approved this summer — every major weapons life extension program and infrastructure upgrade was funded in both chambers’ early proposals — but the compromise bill generally gives the House its way, whenever there was a conflict about NNSA spending or policy directives.
For example, the final bill includes funding to extend the life of the B83 megaton-capable gravity bomb, according to a joint explanatory statement. The Senate was for funding the program, but the House was against it. The compromise NDAA also includes extra funding the House Armed Services Committee parceled in to accelerate studies about how plutonium pits — fissile warhead cores — age.
Some House lawmakers are still open to the idea of slowing construction of pit factories planned for the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. Some of these people argue that if pits have a sufficiently long lifespan, it might not be necessary to make at least 80 new pits annually in the 2030s: the current military requirement driving the NNSA to spin up new pit production in New Mexico this decade.
The NDAA also has $51 million more than requested, $580 million altogether, for the internal confinement fusion program, which includes National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The laser-powered, nuclear-fusion experimental facility, routinely used for nuclear-weapon experiments, achieved a record energy output over the summer.
NNSA’s defense nonproliferation programs also get a $23 billion boost above the request, under the compromise. Most of the increase is for international programs.
Elsewhere in the bill, the compromise National Defense Authorization Act would:
- Require the National Nuclear Security Administration to develop “a comprehensive strategy for” disposing of nuclear waste created by the future plutonium-pit plants at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
- Require the NNSA to report, 60 days after the bill becomes law, on any work the agency did with fiscal 2021 funding to develop a naval reactor fuel system that uses low-enriched uranium fuel. The Senate Armed Services Committee’s version of the NDAA would have blocked such a report until DOE, the Pentagon and the Navy each weighed in on the practicality of a low-enriched uranium naval propulsion system — something the U.S. Navy does not use and, as of Friday afternoon, had no plans to use. Non-proliferation advocates often favor using low-enriched uranium in any application that can make do with it.
- Order the NNSA to turn over the Advanced Technical Intelligence Center for Human Capital Development in Springfield, Ohio, to the Community Improvement Corporation of Clark County and the Chamber of Commerce. The building hosted a nonprofit focused on workforce development for the intelligence and defense industries.
The compromise bill also gave the House its way on a some issues, including by:
- Nixing sense of the Senate language that there should be — as there are now — at least two types of nuclear weapons for use on land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, air-launched cruise missiles and gravity bombs, and submarine-launched ballistic missiles. Instead, the compromise bill says the government should “field a force with an appropriate mix of capabilities and technological distinctiveness” to ensure that the nuclear arsenal meets military needs, even if some technical issue permanently renders “one particular type of nuclear weapon” unsuitable for deployment.
- Scrapping language from the Senate Armed Services Committee’s bill that would have given Congress direct oversight of nuclear weapons testing. The compromise instead “encourage[s] the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, and the National Nuclear Security Administration to ensure the Congress is promptly and fully informed of any issues that may warrant reconsideration of existing policies.”
Editor’s note, 12/28/2021, 3:37 p.m. The story was corrected to show that the NDAA authorizes funds for a B83 life extension.
