Among the highlights of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s detailed fiscal year 2022 budget request: it will cost more than double what the agency once estimated to convert a plutonium recycling plant in South Carolina into a factory for nuclear-weapon triggers; planned air- and sea-launched cruise missiles will share a nuclear tip; next year’s costs to keep the B83 gravity bomb in warm storage are triple this years.
Lawmakers on the House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee will be the first in Congress able to publicly press the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) about these and other details of the Joe Biden administration’s first nuclear-weapons budget during a hearing scheduled for June 10. Acting NNSA Administrator Charles Verdon is among the scheduled witnesses for the virtual hearing.
Overall for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, the administration seeks about $20 billion for the NNSA. While about flat compared with the 2021 appropriation, the 2022 request seeks roughly 12% less for civilian nuclear weapons programs than the Donald Trump administration forecast would be necessary for the coming fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1.
First the big sticker shock: the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility will cost around $11 billion to build, according to the detailed budget justification for the semi-autonomous DOE subagency released Friday, just ahead of the Memorial Day holiday. It also might take until 2035 to begin casting plutonium pits at Savannah River, the NNSA wrote in the request.
The cost and schedule figures for the South Carolina pit factory come from the project’s critical decision-1 review, conducted over the winter and submitted to NNSA headquarters in Washington in April. In an estimate published before the critical decision-1 review, the NNSA thought it might cost $4.6 billion to convert the partially completed Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility in Savannah River Site’s F-Area into a pit plant.
Also in the budget request, the NNSA wrote that the nuclear warhead for a sea-launched cruise missile proposed by the Donald Trump administration, and so far supported by the Biden administration, will be a variant of the W80-4 warhead being prepared for the Pentagon’s next air-launched cruise missile, the Long Range Standoff Weapon.
Work on the sea-launched cruise missile program has to start in fiscal year 2022, NNSA said. A W80 alteration for the sea-based weapon will run on the same production line as the air-based weapon, similar to the way the agency handled a variant of the Navy’s smaller submarine-launched ballistic-missile warhead in 2019. That year, the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas, kept the line used for the W76-1 warhead refurbishment running to create a small, so-far-undisclosed, number of lower-yield W76-2 warheads.
The NNSA plans to produce its W80-4 first production unit, a proof-of-concept article intended to prove the design and manufacturing line is ready for mass production, in fiscal year 2025. The Air Force plans to deploy the Long Range Standoff Weapon around 2030.
Meanwhile, NNSA would spend nearly $98.5 million in fiscal year 2022 to start replacing limited life components in the B83 megaton-capable gravity bomb, if the Biden administration’s NNSA budget request becomes law.
That is over three times higher than the 2021 appropriation of just under $31 million, which did not include a pair of planned B83 alterations mentioned in the 2022 request. This day of reckoning has been in the deck since the Trump administration, in its 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, decided to postpone the weapon’s retirement.
Nonproliferation, Surplus Plutonium, the Office End of MOX
The Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Program would be formally closed out once and for all by fiscal year 2022, the NNSA wrote in its latest budget request, and the agency’s replacement plutonium disposal program would take delivery of key hardware.
That replacement, the Surplus Plutonium Disposition (SPD) Program will combine facilities at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico to chemically weaken 34 metric tons of surplus plutonium, blend it with inert grout, once called stardust, and dispose of the mixture deep underground at the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
Savannah River’s share of this work, sometimes called dilute-and-dispose, will happen mostly at the site’s K-Area alongside existing, and separate, plutonium downblending operations led by the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management.
In fiscal year 2022, Savannah River’s SPD Project — South Carolina’s half of the two-state program — is scheduled to take delivery of one of the three gloveboxes needed to mix surplus plutonium and grout, according to the National Nuclear Security Administration’s detailed fiscal year 2022 budget request.
If all goes according to the NNSA’s plans, and the Joe Biden administration’s budget request becomes law, the SPD Project team at Savannah River should finish all the paperwork and reviews necessary for the NNSA to approve the start of construction of the new facilities at K-Area in fiscal year 2022, according to the budget request.
SPD is supposed to begin processing plutonium around 2028 and operate into the 2040s.
Last year, the DOE and South Carolina reached a $600 million settlement, the largest in state history, that both sides hoped would resolve the agency’s failure to dispose of 34 metric tons of plutonium using the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at Savannah River Site’s F-Area. The facility, officially cancelled in 2018, was to turn the plutonium into commercial reactor fuel starting in the 2020s.
Now, “[f]inal physical project termination and asset disposition [for the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility] remains on schedule to [be] completed by FY 2021,” the NNSA wrote in its latest budget request.
Meanwhile, the NNSA’s Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation account overall, which includes nuclear counterterrorism and response efforts, would be about flat, year-over-year, if the Biden administration’s budget becomes law: $2.2 billion.
Cut out counterterrorism programs and some legacy pension obligations, which are book kept under the nonproliferation appropriation, and core nonproliferation programs would be down about half a percent to $1.85 billion in 2022 from $1.86 billion in 2021.
The overall Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation request for 2022 is still about 10% higher than the $2.1 billion that Donald Trump administration, in its final NNSA budget forecast, thought the portfolio would need in fiscal year 2022.
