The Nuclear Weapons Council would have to write annual progress reports for Congress about the Department of Energy’s plan to produce 80 nuclear-warhead cores a year by 2030, if an amendment proposed this week to a fiscal 2019 budget bill becomes law.
Amendment SA 2921, from Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), would require the chair of the Nuclear Weapons Council, a body that includes DOE and Department of Defense officials responsible for maintaining the nuclear arsenal, to certify each year through 2025 that the Los Alamos National Laboratory is on track to annually produce 30 nuclear of the plutonium pits by 2026.
As part of the annual certification, the first of which would be due in April if the amendment is approved and the underlying bill signed into law, the chair would also have to show “the timelines for demonstrating a capability to produce an additional 50 war reserve plutonium pits per year,” Heinrich’s amendment reads.
The amendment was still awaiting a vote on the Senate floor at deadline Wednesday for Weapons Complex Morning Briefing. The Senate began debating the 2019 Department of Energy spending bill Tuesday and had not scheduled a vote on the bill, or a vote to curtail debate, at deadline Wednesday.
This year, DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) made official its long-rumored strategy to produce plutonium pits at both Los Alamos in New Mexico and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. Los Alamos was to have the work to itself, until the NNSA decided it would shift the majority of pit production to Savannah River by converting an unfinished plutonium-disposal plant there into a new pit factory.
Heinrich opposes the two-state plan.
The Senate is now debating a three-bill appropriations package called a minibus that includes the upper chamber’s proposed 2019 budget for the Department of Energy, including active nuclear-weapon programs and other activities managed by the NNSA. The semiautonomous weapons agency would receive a little under $15 billion in the budget year beginning Oct. 1, if the Senate’s proposal becomes law. The House’s version of the minibus would give the NNSA a little more than $15 billion for fiscal 2019.
