The National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) $12.9 billion budget request for fiscal 2017 maintains relatively flat funding levels for the agency’s weapons research, production, and testing sites.
The Lawrence Livermore (LLNL) and Sandia National laboratories (SNL) would see the smallest change from the fiscal 2016 appropriation – a 1 percent proposed decrease to $1.2 billion for the nuclear weapons research lab LLNL, and relatively no change to SNL’s $1.8 billion. Funding for the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) under the NNSA budget would be $1.8 billion – $93 million, or 5 percent, below the currently enacted amount.
The Nevada National Security Site would receive 5 percent more funding at $396.4 million, while funding for the Pantex Plant, the nuclear weapons assembly and disassembly site in Texas, would rise by $46 million, or 7 percent, to $707.7 million.
The most significant funding request increases went to the National Security Campus (NSC) near Kansas City, Mo., and the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee, due to infrastructure projects at both sites. The NSC’s funding request increased by 21 percent from the current appropriation, to $744.9 million, mainly due to funding needed to dispose of the Kansas City Bannister Federal Complex that previously hosted the NNSA’s non-nuclear component production activities prior to being relocated in 2013-2014.
Funding for Y-12 would increase by 16 percent to $1.5 billion, mainly due to an added $145 million in funding for construction of the Uranium Processing Facility (UPF), boosting the total request for the UPF to $575 million. The construction project, expected to be completed by 2025, will transition uranium processing activities out of the site’s aging 9212 complex into a modern, centralized structure.
Los Alamos Funding
LANL’s costliest category, weapons activities, which includes requests for directed stockpile work ($580.9 million), infrastructure and operations ($510.7 million), advanced simulation and computing ($175.1 million), science ($147.5 million), and defense nuclear security ($102 million), is proposed at $1.58 billion, down $120 million from the current fiscal year’s total weapons activities budget of $1.7 billion.
Among significant alterations in operational plans at LANL that were reflected in the budget request, perhaps the most notable was the cancellation of the multibillion-dollar Nuclear Facility of the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement project, which was deferred in 2012 in the budget request for fiscal 2013. The remaining mission need for CMRR-NF, as it was known, has been restructured into what are currently four subprojects: REI2 (The second phase of the Radiographic Laboratory Utility Office Building Equipment Installation); PEI1 and PEI2 (phase 1 and 2 of the Plutonium Facility Equipment Installation), and RC3 (recategorizing RLUOB to a Hazard Category 3 facility with a radiological material limit of 400 grams of Pu-239 equivalent). DOE’s fiscal 2017 budget justification document says these steps “are necessary to provide continuity in analytical chemistry (AC) and materials characterization (MC) capabilities and support the cessation of programmatic operations in the existing CMR facility by the end of calendar year 2019.”
Another important change was conspicuous by its absence in the documentation. As Greg Mello of the watchdog Los Alamos Study Group pointed out, “The FY 17 NNSA budget request does not include underground plutonium processing ‘modules’ at LANL.” In a press release shortly after the budget documents became available online, he wrote, “Pit infrastructure plans have changed again, perhaps very recently.”
NNSA officials responded to a question about the Plutonium Modular Approach during a budget press conference Wednesday. Brig. Gen S.L. Davis, acting deputy administrator for defense programs, said the capabilities now under way accommodate a pit-making schedule of 10 pits in 2024, 20 pits in 2025, and 30 pits in 2026, as mandated by Congress. But he said there was no money for funding of major construction items like the plutonium modules that would be needed to get to the 50-80 pits per year required under the law. “We have some money for design of a plutonium capability,” he said. “We’re currently undergoing an analysis of alternatives to see if that would be plutonium modules at Los Alamos or perhaps some other alternatives.”
NNSA Administrator Frank Klotz said there was money in the fiscal 2017 budget in the Plutonium Sustainment Fund and that money would be used to develop the conceptual design, with $12 million a year assigned to the PMA in the future years. “We’ll be back in the FY 18 or 19 budget … when we have better figures for that,” he said.
