A compromise defense policy bill published Monday would authorize all the nuclear weapon spending the Department of Energy sought for fiscal 2020, bar the agency from downgrading the hazard classification of certain nuclear waste in Washington state, and prohibit defense funding for the proposed Yucca Mountain permanent waste repository.
The House is set to vote Wednesday on the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), details of which a bicameral conference committee of House and Senate negotiators unveiled about two months after the federal budgetr year began on Oct. 1. The NDAA does not provide appropriations; it sets policy and spending limits for defense programs, including those managed by the Energy Department.
Under the proposed NDAA, DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) would be authorized to spend a little more than $16.5 billion in 2020: about even with the agency request, and about 8% more than the 2019 budget. Notably, the compromise bill would not limit funding for the NNSA’s planned complex for production of plutonium pits, the fissile cores of nuclear weapons.
The bill would authorize around $710 million for the NNSA to design and build a two-state pit complex at DOE sites in New Mexico and South Carolina, and require that complex to produce not less than 80 pits by 2030.
The bill also would allow the Navy to deploy the W76-2 low-yield, submarine-launched ballistic-missile warhead as planned. In their version of the NDAA, House Democrats had proposed restricting funding for design and construction of the pit complex and banning the low-yield warhead.
The Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management, which cleans up active and shuttered nuclear weapon production sites, would be authorized to spend more than $5.5 billion on its largest account, defense environmental cleanup. That is roughly in line with the DOE request, but nearly 8.5% lower than the 2019 budget. Most major cleanup sites would be authorized to spend at or above requested levels, under the bill. To pay for increases elsewhere in the account, demolition of excess facilities at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory would be authorized for about $55 million: less than half the budget.
Also under the proposed final NDAA, the Environmental Management office would be prohibited from reclassifying high-level waste in Washington state to a lower hazard category. It is one of the few overt policy victories in the bill for House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.), who inserted the provision into the lower chamber’s version of the NDAA. Washington state is home to the Hanford Site, DOE’s most expensive and complex remediation job.
By law, DOE must dispose of high-level waste in a geologic repository, such as the proposed Yucca Mountain site. No such site exists for U.S. waste. Radioactive waste that can be chemically similar to high-level waste, such as transuranic waste, may be sent to disposal sites that do already exist.
Regarding Yucca Mountain, the NDAA would prohibit the DOE from using any 2020 funding for licensing disposal of defense-nuclear waste at the proposed site in Nye County, Nev. The White House requested $26 million for that purpose in 2020.
