The Donald Trump administration this week proposed what would amount to a $2-billion-a-year raise for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) — a roughly $15-billion fiscal 2019 budget request that would accelerate existing nuclear-warhead refurbishment programs and consider making warhead cores somewhere other than New Mexico.
The Department of Energy’s (DOE) fiscal 2019 budget request also continues the administration’s plan — which so far Congress has blocked — to cancel the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility: a massive construction project at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina that supports a plutonium arms-reduction pact with Russia.
Steven Erhart, acting NNSA administrator, also kept open the possibility this week that the Savannah River Site might one day produce plutonium pits, the fissile cores of nuclear weapons. However, Erhart said in a conference call with reporters that the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico will keep a share of the pit mission, at least initially.
Also this week, the NNSA said it wants to resume studying the first in a series of proposed interoperable warheads in 2019. NNSA previously had planned to start the study in 2020. The interoperable warhead program, introduced by the Barack Obama administration in 2013, aims to replace the four warheads now used on U.S. intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine-launched ballistic missiles with three new warheads that could be used on both missile types.
The budget details that dribbled out this week detailed proposed funding levels for the NNSA’s four major branches, but not for most individual programs. That means any increased investments in ongoing projects and proposed new starts remained largely unknown at deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor, and likely will until DOE releases its detailed budget justification.
Among other things, the 2019 justification could contain information about, and proposed NNSA funding for, the new low-yield, submarine-launched warheads the White House asked for in the Nuclear Posture Review released earlier this month.
According to a communication from a DOE official, which Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor reviewed this week, the agency plans to roll out the 2019 justification within two weeks of Feb. 13.
Overall, the White House requested over $15 billion for the NNSA in fiscal 2019, which begins on Oct. 1: more than 16 percent above what the agency has gotten under a series of stopgap budget bills that have funded the federal government for more than four months of fiscal 2018. This year’s proposed increase is about 6-percent higher even than the billion-dollar boost the Trump administration proposed last May for 2018.
The NNSA’s Weapons Activities account would get almost every penny of that extra money in 2019. The account, which handles warhead modernization, production of special nuclear materials, and storage of excess warheads, would see its budget rise about 20 percent to some $11 billion a year, if the requested budget becomes law.
Directed Stockpile Work, which funds all four of the NNSA’s ongoing warhead modernization programs, would get a 40-percent boost to more than $4.5 billion in fiscal 2019, under the request.
The Trump administration’s proposed increases for the NNSA would raise the budget for the agency’s weapons programs much faster than the Barack Obama administration envisioned in 2016, when it submitted its final NNSA budget request.
The NNSA’s naval reactors program would also get a big boost in 2019 under the latest budget request: a 26-percent increase to roughly $1.8 billion. Conversely, the White House seeks to cut the agency’s nuclear nonproliferation programs by about 1 percent, to about $1.9 billion.
Among the few project-level details released this week, the White House asked for $220 million to wind down the MOX project: around a 34 percent reduction from the current construction budget. In parallel, the administration proposed a sharp increase to develop a yet-unfunded alternative means of fulfilling its plutonium-disposal mission: $59 million, up from the $9 million requested but not yet appropriated for 2018.
CB&I AREVA MOX Services is building the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility to turn 34 metric tons of weapon-grade plutonium into commercial reactor fuel as part of an arms-control pact with Russia that was negotiated by the Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama administrations.
There were, on the other hand, no funding details released this week about another big NNSA construction project, the Uranium Processing Facility at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn. Bechtel National is building that facility help refurbish U.S. warheads. NNSA has pledged to complete the plant by 2025, provided Congress meets the agency’s funding requests.
Meanwhile, Erhart provided some color about the NNSA’s pit plan on a conference call with reporters Monday. The acting agency head said the NNSA wants to use the Los Alamos National Laboratory to produce about 30 warhead cores per year, which is fewer than half of the 80 pits a year the Pentagon needs DOE to crank out by 2030. The NNSA is “looking at alternatives” to Los Alamos to meet the 80-a-year goal, Erhart said.
The agency is studying whether it can convert the Savannah River Site’s Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility into a pit-production plant. Members of South Carolina’s congressional delegation are in favor of taking on the pit mission, but not at the expense of the MFF’s current nonproliferation mission.
For 2019, the NNSA plans only to produce five so-called development pits for the W87 intercontinental ballistic missile warhead. The pits are essentially proof-of-concept articles that would not be deployed on active nuclear missiles.
The House Appropriations Committee had not scheduled a hearing about DOE’s 2019 budget request at deadline Friday.
Currently, DOE, like most of the rest of the federal government, is still frozen at its 2017 budget, under the fifth stopgap budget bill of the 2018 fiscal year. The latest of these continuing resolutions funds the federal government through March 23.
