The Senate Armed Services Committee’s fiscal 2020 National Defense Authorization Act would allow for full funding of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) plan to build plutonium nuclear-weapon cores in two states, a senior committee aide confirmed Thursday.
The committee finished a closed-door markup of the annual military policy bill Wednesday, then had senior staffers brief the press about the measure’s contents.
The bill meets the White House funding requests for fiscal 2020 for all Pentagon and civilian nuclear weapons programs, aides said.
The proposed pit authorization marks a victory, though not a final one, for the NNSA. The agency sought $410 million for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1 to design what it calls the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility (SRPPF) in Aiken, S.C. the NNSA would build the facility on the site of a partially completed, now-terminated plutonium disposal plant. The SRPPF request was part of a $710-million ask for the agency’s Plutonium Sustainment budget.
The SRPPF would by 2030 cast 50 fissile weapon cores a year, initially for future intercontinental ballistic-missile warheads. The plant would pair with planned upgrades to an old pit complex at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, which would start casting 10 pits a year in 2024, then ramp up to 30 a year by 2030. The Trump administration’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review called on the NNSA to make 80 pits a year by 2030.
The Senate committee’s National Defense Authorization Act would, despite some fretting over the expense this year by Armed Services Chair James Inhofe (R-Okla.), make the split-state pit plan the law of the land. However, congressional appropriators must still provide the requested funds for the plants — and those in the House already have not.
On Tuesday, the House Appropriations Committee approved a roughly $16 billion NNSA spending bill that recommended only $470 million for Plutonium Sustainment, without earmarking any money at all for the planned Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility. Essentially, the House committee permitted the NNSA to start designing a pit plant at Savannah River, but did not give the agency all the funding it said it needed for the task.
An NNSA-chartered assessment completed last year by Parsons Government Services found it could cost about $30 billion to make pits at Los Alamos and Savannah River over the next several decades, and that the NNSA’s approach, at least as it existed then, was unlikely to meet the 2030 deadline of 80 pits a year.
NNSA officials, including Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, have since said they have figured out a way to get the two-state pit complex back on schedule, provided Congress appropriates all requested funding.
Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), a friend of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, has cited the Parsons report, and another independent study completed this year by the Pentagon-funded Institute for Defense Analyses, as evidence that building pits in South Carolina could derail the agency’s budget.
Heinrich in hearings this year and last cited the Parsons’ report estimate that building pits only at Los Alamos might cost about half as much as a two-state complex. The NNSA and the Pentagon insist they need two pit plants in case one is unable to perform to specifications.
A spokesperson for Heinrich said the Senator voted for the committee’s NDAA, which authorizes full funding to upgrade Los Alamos’s PF-4 plutonium facility for production of 30 pits annually by 2026. PF-4 would start making pits in 2024, aiming to crank out 10 that year, according to NNSA’s current plans.
