The House of Representatives on Friday approved legislation that fully funds a new low-yield warhead in fiscal 2019, shies away from a future warhead usable by both Air Force and Navy missiles, and potentially trips up the National Nuclear Security Administration’s plan to make warhead cores in two states.
The House voted 235-179, essentially along party lines, to send a so-called minibus appropriations package including the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) 2019 budget to the Senate.
House members voted down amendments that would have siphoned off about $100 million in proposed funding for NNSA weapon programs, and a separate amendment that would have removed funding for the low-yield warhead, which the Donald Trump administration asked the NNSA to build as part of the Nuclear Posture Review published in February. The votes were along party lines, with Republicans supporting the warhead and opposing cuts to NNSA weapons programs.
The Senate could take up a similar minibus appropriations package in August, when Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has ordered lawmakers to work through much of their traditional summer recess in order to get a budget to President Trump’s desk before the 2019 fiscal year starts on Oct. 1.
Opposition to the low-yield warhead in the Senate might yet derail that plan, even if everything else goes smoothly in the upper chamber. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has said she strongly opposes the new weapon, which she and other top Democrats say is not needed to deter adversaries including Russia from using similarly powerful nuclear weapons. Republicans have a 51-49 majority in the Senate, with 60 votes needed to pass legislation. Any Democratic opposition therefore poses a threat to any bill.
Meanwhile, there is another future warhead about which the House and Senate Appropriations committees disagree: the first in a series of three so-called interoperable warheads, which could fly on both Air Force and Navy missiles.
The Senate Appropriations Committee has directed the NNSA to spend $53 million on the warhead, which was established by the Barack Obama administration. The bill the full House approved Friday directs the agency to spend the $53 millions studying a life-extension program for the Air Force-only W78 warhead the first interoperable warhead would replace.
The House and Senate Appropriations committees also disagree on the path forward for the NNSA’s plutonium-pit production program. The Trump administration wants the agency to make at least 80 of these fissile warhead cores a year by 2030 to support arsenal upgrades started under the Obama administration’s 30-year nuclear modernization plan.
The NNSA wants to use the over-budget Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) under construction at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., to make 50 pits a year, while the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico handles the other 30.
That would require canceling the MFFF’s existing mission to turn 34 metric tons of weapon-usable plutonium into commercial reactor fuel under an arms control pact with Russia. The House Appropriations bill bucks that plan, providing $335 million for MFFF construction and no money for an alternative plutonium disposal plan called dilute-and-dispose, which involves burying the surplus plutonium deep underground at the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.
However, the House bill would allow the NNSA to cancel the MFFF by certifying dilute-and-dispose would cost about half as much as simply finishing the facility— something the agency has already done. The House cribbed its MFFF waiver language from the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act, and Energy Secretary Rick Perry delivered that waiver, plus a detailed cost estimate on MFFF and dilute-and-dispose, to the House and Senate Armed Services committees in May.
Perry said it would cost $20 billion to carry out dilute-and-dispose, compared with $50 billion to finish the MFFF. However, a federal judge this week said those figures might not be directly comparable, as the 2018 defense act requires.
South Carolina is suing the NNSA in federal court to stop the agency from canceling the MFFF. On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Judge J. Michelle Childs handed down an injunction that would temporarily prohibit the federal government from closing the plant while the case plays out in court.
Meanwhile, the Senate was to begin debate next week on a 2019 National Defense Authorization Act that would legally prohibit the NNSA from closing or repurposing the MFFF until 2020. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) MFFF’s chief ally in the Senate, wrote that provision into the bill.
The two chambers are also split about other Savannah River Site spending plans.
The House’s bill would approve only $2 million for new tritium production capabilities at Savannah River, while the Senate Appropriations Committee fully backed the Trump administration’s $27-million request to begin building new tritium-handling infrastructure at the site in 2019.
Estimated to cost about $500 million to construct, the planned Tritium Production Capability would replace the Savannah River Site’s 1950s-vintage H Area Old Manufacturing Facility. In the facility, the NNSA performs final manufacturing touches on tritium reservoirs that are filled elsewhere on the site, then inspects the reservoirs before preparing them for shipment off-site.
Otherwise, the House and Senate generally agree on 2019 NNSA weapons spending, as shown in Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor’s 2019 budget tracker.
Overall, the House bill would give the NNSA more than $15 billion for 2019: 4.5 percent more than in 2018 and 1.5 percent more than the White House sought for fiscal 2019. The House’s proposed 2019 NNSA budget is about 3.5 percent, or around $500 million, higher than what the Senate Appropriations Committee has recommended. Accounting for most of the split, the House bill would provide much more funding for maintenance and recapitalization of NNSA infrastructure than would the Senate committee’s bill.
Both the House and Senate bills, however, meet the administration’s funding request for ongoing life-extension programs for three nuclear warheads and one nuclear bomb, at a combined $2 billion or so.
