Lame-duck budget negotiations are officially underway, and the Senate’s opening gambit for the National Nuclear Security Administration was to give the agency the roughly $20 billion it sought for 2021: over $1 billion more than what the House of Representatives recommended.
That’s according to a bill and an accompanying report the Senate Armed Services Committee released Tuesday.
Critically, Senate appropriators provided all $1.4 billion worth of plutonium modernization funding that the semi-autonomous Department of Energy nuclear-weapon steward requested to build plutonium-pit factories at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C. The House, in an energy and water bill passed in July as part of a broader spending package, recommended some $300 million less than that, in a bid to slow down the planned pit plant in South Carolina.
The pit facilities will initially make the plutonium cores of W87-1 warheads intended for future Ground Based Strategic Deterrent intercontinental ballistic missiles: the replacement for the 400-strong Minuteman III fleet. Los Alamos is supposed to start casting war-ready pits in 2024, Savannah River by 2030.
The Senate also includes the $53 million the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) sought for early development of the proposed W93 submarine-launched ballistic-missile warhead. The weapon will eventually replace both the Navy’s W76 and W87 warheads. W93, which NNSA says will be based on a previously-exploded design, will also be the basis of the United Kingdom’s next nuclear warhead.
The Senate’s bill puts the upper chamber on a long-foreshadowed collision course with the House, which approved a 2021 NNSA budget that would provide the requested funding for ongoing nuclear-weapons modernization programs, but scale back infrastructure upgrades that the agency says it needs to maintain the arsenal for the rest of the 21st century.
Meanwhile, the NNSA and the rest of the government is funded under a continuing resolution that largely froze federal budgets at 2021 levels. For the most part, the stopgap bill shorts NNSA programs more than the House’s 2021 proposal, relative to the agency’s 2021 request.
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Publications focused on cleanup of U.S. Cold War nuclear-weapon sites, active U.S. nuclear weapons programs and the commercial radioactive waste industry.
NEW: Via public records request, I’ve been able to confirm reporting today that a warrant has been issued for DOE deputy asst. secretary of spent fuel and waste disposition Sam Brinton for another luggage theft, this time at Las Vegas’s Harry Reid airport. (cc: @EMPublications)
DOE spent fuel lead Brinton accused of second luggage theft.
by @BenjaminSWeiss, confirming today's reports with warrant from Las Vegas Metro PD.
Waste has been Emplaced! 🚮
We have finally begun emplacing defense-related transuranic (TRU) waste in Panel 8 of #WIPP.
Read more about the waste emplacement here: https://wipp.energy.gov/wipp_news_20221123-2.asp
Editorial: Sam Brinton’s credibility is now an issue 🔓