NNSA, nuclear weapons fully funded through compromise bill

The National Nuclear Security Administration stands to see its roughly $24 billion budget request fulfilled under the compromise funding agreement reached by Congress this week.  

The House approved the bill on Wednesday by a vote of 339 to 85, the Senate was still debating the measure at deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor, with vote scheduled for later in the day. Federal funding for DOE and other agencies covered by the appropriations package was set to run out after midnight.

The bill includes just over $19 billion for NNSA weapons activities and includes a requirement that the agency work with the scientific advisory group JASON to “conduct an assessment of the report entitled, “Research Program Plan for Plutonium and Pit Aging.” The report has already been the subject of scrutiny by the Government Accountability Office.

JASON has worked with the NNSA previously to characterize how plutonium pits used in the primary stages of nuclear weapons age and how their process of radioactive decay affects the isotope’s explosive properties.

Also included in the funding bill is $690 million for the Inertial Confinement Fusion program, the agency’s high-energy nuclear-weapons diagnostic and testing laboratories. That includes at least $410,000,000 for the National Ignition Facility, $99.4 million for the OMEGA laser facility at the University of Rochester in New York, $85 million for the Z Pulsed Power Facility at the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico and $30 million for Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation netted $2.5 billion. The compromise bill “recognizes the challenges inherent in commercializing Molybdenum-99 production technologies and encourages a whole-of-government collaboration regarding the financial sustainability of

domestic production of this medical isotope.”

Domestic Molybdenum-99 production has been a congressional priority for more than a decade. At least $50 million in the latest NNSA budget bill will go to existing or new laboratory agreements to establish “stable domestic sources” of Molybdenum-99 without the use of highly enriched uranium.