In a move first proposed by the Senate this summer, the final fiscal 2019 budget for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) moves funding for uranium downblending into the agency’s tritium sustainment account.
The move was contrary to the Donald Trump administration’s request, which grouped money for uranium downblending under the NNSA domestic uranium enrichment program. Both programs are managed within the agency’s Defense Programs office. The NNSA needs to downblend its own stock of highly enriched uranium to produce low-enriched uranium that can be burned in a commercial reactor, along with other special rods, to produce tritium for U.S. nuclear weapons.
Tritium boosts the power of nuclear weapons.
Trump signed a multi-agency appropriations act Friday that includes just over $15 billion for the NNSA, which manages the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons operations.
In the bill, the NNSA’s tritium sustainment account got a little over $290 million for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1: a 3-percent raise from 2018 and $85 million more than requested.
“No funds are provided for downblending highly enriched uranium” within the domestic uranium enrichment program that had previously funded the effort, Congress said in the joint explanatory statement appended to the legislation. However, “Funds at the requested level for downblending are included in the Tritium Sustainment account.”
The domestic uranium enrichment program, which is studying ways to restart a domestic enrichment system, got $50 million in 2019: only half as much as the administration sought and a roughly 15 percent cut from the current budget.
Also last week, the NNSA issued a follow-up notice in the Federal Register that the agency planned to downblend its own highly enriched uranium into low-enriched uranium to produce tritium, per longstanding agency practice, in the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar Unit 1 nuclear reactor beginning in 2019.
That followed Secretary of Energy Rick Perry’s Aug. 21 determination that tapping into the agency’s private stash of highly enriched uranium remains in the national interest. Low-enriched uranium purchased on the spot market by law cannot by law be used for weapons programs.
