The National Nuclear Security Administration would get all the money it needs, and more, in what’s left of fiscal year 2020, including some $710 million to start work on a controversial two-state plutonium pit complex that would bring a new nuclear-weapon mission to South Carolina.
The compromise budget bill, details of which the House unveiled late Monday, also includes the requested $10 million for building and delivering remaining W76-2 low-yield, submarine-launched, ballistic-missile warheads, and the requested $52 million to keep the megaton-capable B83 gravity bomb in war-ready shape, ending for now a debate about two politically contentious recommendations from the Donald Trump administration’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review.
The legislation covering the Energy Department is one of two multi-agency “minibus” appropriations packages that would fund the government through the end of fiscal 2020 on Sept. 30. The current continuing resolution, which held federal agencies including the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to 2019 spending levels, will run out Friday. Congress must approve the new budget bills before then. The House was set to consider both 2020 spending packages on the floor Tuesday. Most defense programs are grouped in one spending bill; non-defense programs are grouped in a second, which includes the NNSA and its defense-nuclear work.
Proposed funding for the NNSA handily bests the $16.5 billion the White House requested for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. It marks better than an 8% increase from the 2019 appropriation. The House had recommended just under $16 billion for 2020, the Senate almost $17 billion.
Among other things, the compromise bill would approve NNSA’s requests for major increases for its W80-4 modernization program to extend the life of the warhead slated to tip the planned Long-Range Standoff Weapon cruise missile, which the Pentagon wants to deploy on or after 2025. The semiautonomous DOE branch would receive the roughly $900 million it sought for W80-4 in 2020, up from about $655 million in 2019.
Perhaps the biggest victory for current NNSA policy is the $710 million the agency would receive, as requested, for its Plutonium Sustainment account: a sharp rise from the 2019 level of about $360 million. The account includes funding to build a pair of factories designed to together annually produce 80 fissile nuclear-weapon cores by 2030, including 50 a year by 2030 at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
Of the 2020 increase, NNSA sought some $410 million to begin designing the Plutonium Processing Facility, to be built on the remains of the canceled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at the Savannah River in South Carolina. This would be the second, and larger, of the agency’s planned pit factories. The first, planned for the Los Alamos National Laboratory, would begin cranking out 10 pits a year by 2024.
In a nod to House Democrats, who wanted to slow funding for the pit complex to the general loss of the proposed Savannah River pit plant, the compromise 2020 spending bill would require the NNSA to give Congress quarterly reports about the agency’s progress building both pit infrastructure and pits themselves.
