Brian Bradley
NS&D Monitor
3/20/2015
The Obama Administration and Congress should work to make sure the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program has enough funding and resources to address current and projected necessary investments in the overall naval nuclear enterprise, according to a report released March 19 by the Federation of American Scientists (FAS). The report “Naval Nuclear Propulsion: Assessing Benefits and Risks” outlines a series of recommendations and findings that emerged from an independent, nonpartisan task force that FAS convened to examine potential options for alternatives to highly enriched uranium (HEU) for naval propulsion and to identify ways to monitor and safeguard HEU and low enriched uranium in the naval sector.
Among the findings were that HEU in naval nuclear propulsion poses proliferation and security risks, the U.S. and other nuclear navies have benefited from nuclear-powered warships, and that “reviving” nuclear arms control could allow for further ballistic missile submarine reductions and extend the U.S. stockpile of enriched uranium. “If in the future the United States decides that 1,000 or fewer deployed strategic warheads are needed as compared to New START’s 1,550 deployed strategic warheads, the SSBN fleet could be reduced to 10 or fewer boats,” the report states. “This would allow an extension of the U.S. stockpile of enriched uranium set aside for naval reactors and thus delay the time when a new enrichment plant would be needed. Development of life-of-the-ship LEU reactors could allow use of LEU-fueled SSBNs in the replacement generation beyond the recently designed SSBN(X), which is planned to start construction in 2021.”
