The House of Representatives’ version of the fiscal 2019 National Defense Authorization Act would authorize $65 million in funding to begin work on a new low-yield nuclear warhead for submarine-launched ballistic missiles as part of an overall $15.3 billion National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) budget, according to a bill summary provided Friday by the House Armed Services Committee.
The overall NNSA budget recommended by the House bill is about $500 million more than the fiscal 2018 appropriation for the semiautonomous Energy Department agency and roughly $200 million higher than what the administration sought in the 2019 budget request rolled out in March.
Besides authorizing exactly what the White House requested for the NNSA low-yield warhead work this year, the bill would also lift a legal prohibition that prevents the nuclear weapons agency from “developing and producing low-yield nuclear warheads absent congressional authorization,” according to the summary for the legislation.
Committee Democrats in the minority have questioned the ramp-up in spending for U.S. nuclear forces, and have particularly objected to the low-yield, submarine-launched warhead: one of two low-yield warheads called for in the Nuclear Posture Review the Donald Trump administration published in February.
The low-yield, submarine-launched ballistic missile warhead would be a modified version of the W76 now used on the Trident II D5 missiles carried aboard the Navy’s Ohio-class submarines. The NNSA wants to do the modification as part of the ongoing W76 life-extension program slated to wrap up in fiscal 2019.
Meanwhile, and just like last year’s bill, the 2019 NDAA would authorize the NNSA to continue building the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., in spite of the agency’s request to cancel the project. Also like last year’s bill, the latest NDAA allows the agency to obtain a waiver and cancel the facility. In the 2018 NDAA, Congress said the MOX project could be shut down if the agency could prove a proposed alternative is about half as expensive as simply finishing the facility. The bill summary did not specify the terms under which NNSA could obtain a waiver next year.
The Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, over budget and far behind schedule, is designed to dispose of 34 metric tons of surplus weapon-usable plutonium as part of an arms-control agreement with Russia.
The House Armed Services Committee is slated to mark up the 2019 NDAA on Wednesday, after which it would go to the House floor for a vote. The Senate Armed Services Committee is set to mark up its version of the legislation the week of May 21. The Senate has not released the text or summary of its NDAA, and its markups will be closed to the public.
The NDAA, an annual military policy bill, does not provide funding. Rather, it sets policy and provides spending limits for congressional appropriations committees that write the annual budget bills for federal defense agencies, including the NNSA.
The House Armed Services Committee had not released the text of the 2019 NDAA at deadline Friday. Fiscal 2019 begins on Oct. 1.
Other provisions of the House’s proposed 2019 NDAA highlighted in Friday’s summary include:
- A report on the cost of retaining the B83 nuclear gravity bomb, which was slated to be retired before the Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review called for keeping the weapon in service. Some Senate Democrats conditioned their support of the ongoing U.S. nuclear deterrent modernization program, initiated by the Barack Obama administration, on phasing out this multiple-yield weapon.
- A report “on the rationale for the Nuclear Posture Review recommendation to change the annual plutonium pit requirement to ‘at least 80 pits’ from a previous requirement of ’50-80 pits.'” Pits are fissile nuclear-weapon cores. The Defense Department wants the NNSA to crank out 80 a year by 2030. The Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico will take on part of that mission, producing 30 per year by 2026, but the NNSA is considering converting the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility into a pit plant to reach 80 a year by 2030.
- Authorizing $10 million to study whether low-enriched uranium could be used for naval reactor fuel.
- Authorizing the NNSA’s “independent office of Cost Estimate and Program Evaluation to review and provide cost estimates for construction projects excessing [sic] $500 million.”
- Requiring “the Secretary of Energy to impose civil penalties on contractors for violations of Department of Energy rules, regulations, and orders relating to nuclear safety and radiation protection.”
- Requiring briefings to Congress on the vapor problems at the Hanford Site: a sprawling, Cold War plutonium-production campus now being cleaned up by the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management. This is the largest nuclear-cleanup project in the agency’s roughly $7-billion-a-year Environmental Management portfolio. Workers at Hanford say they have been exposed to potentially toxic vapors from liquid radioactive waste stored in tanks at the Richland, Wash., site.
