The National Nuclear Security Administration got its big requested budget increase under the omnibus spending bill signed into law just before New Year’s, jumpstarting key nuclear-weapons programs even as the incoming Joe Biden administration squares up the ongoing U.S. modernization regimen for possible cuts.
The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) will get $19.7 billion, which is just a hair less than requested and more than $3 billion above the 2020 budget. It’s a vindication for ex-NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, who prior to being forced to resign her post in early November went to the mattresses with the DOE, Congress and the administration for the larger-than-expected civilian nuclear-weapons budget.
Fiscal 2021 is the second year in a row when, faced with the choice of cutting Cold War nuclear-cleanup at the DOE’s Office of Environmental Management or not meeting the request for active weapons programs at NNSA, Congress went for Plan C: increases for both.
Under the omnibus, the NNSA’s core programs to refurbish and maintain active nuclear weapons get the requested funding, as do the agency’s programs to build and upgrade weapons-production infrastructure in New Mexico, Tennessee and South Carolina.
The compromise bill also provides $53 million to begin work on the proposed W93 submarine-launched ballistic missile warhead: a weapon the House wanted to zero out. W93 will be a previously tested nuclear-explosive package in a new Mark 7 aeroshell to be designed according to Navy needs.
W93 will also share technology with the United Kingdom’s next submarine-launched warhead: a replacement for the Trident Holbrook that will be carried by the planned fleet of Dreadnought ballistic-missile submarines.
The Senate essentially rolled the House again in nuclear-weapon budget negotiations this year, with the GOP-controlled upper chamber getting its way about everything from the W-93 to the controversial plutonium pit production factories the NNSA is building at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
Including upgrades to the Los Alamos pit plant and modifications to turn the cancelled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at Savannah River into a pit factory, the omnibus has some $1.2 billion more for pits than the 2020 budget.
The NNSA plans to cast multiple war-ready pits — fissile nuclear weapon cores — starting in 2024 at Los Alamos, then ramp up to at least 80 pits a year by 2030 using both facilities. These pits will all, at least initially, be for the W87-1 warheads that will eventually tip the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent rockets scheduled to replace existing Minuteman III nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles around 2030.
The first deployed Ground Based Strategic Deterrent Missiles could use W87-0 warheads from the Minuteman fleet, the NNSA has said. W87-1 will be essentially a copy of the existing warhead, but with a new pit.
Outside of DOE, the bill provides $31 million for the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board: the independent federal watchdog for active and shuttered nuclear weapon sites. That’s about flat compared with 2020 and some $3 million more than requested.
The report accompanying the 2021 omnibus spending bill also directs the defense board to maintain a staff of at least 110 full-time equivalents — the board had talked about cutting back to under 100 — and directs DOE and the board to continue working on a memorandum of understanding about their day-to-day interactions under DOE’s still-active Order 140.1.
The order restricts interactions between the two federal agencies, and the bill report called it part of “the Department’s continued desire to reshape, often without merit, the Department’s interactions with the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board.”
