The Department of Energy’s plan for plutonium pit manufacturing will be made clearer in the Donald Trump administration’s 2019 budget request in February, agency officials told members of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board last week.
That is according to a presentation uploaded to the board’s website Friday after a briefing with Department of Energy and National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) officials including Phil Calbos: the agency’s principal assistant deputy administrator for defense programs.
Bloomberg and Politico both reported Wednesday the 2019 budget would be rolled out Feb. 12.
Last year, in a nine-page summary of a much larger study, it leaked out to the press that the NNSA thought it could annually produce 80 nuclear weapon cores called plutonium pits by moving production to South Carolina from New Mexico. A similar summary appeared on the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board’s website Friday.
According to those slides, the NNSA will provide “cost/schedule estimates by early February to support FY19 President’s Budget Request Rollout.”
The president’s budget request is the White House detailed spending plan for the government fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. The administration is legally required to publish the request in the first week of February, but presidents of both parties routinely blow the deadline.
The White House Office of Management and Budget, which quarterbacks the administration’s budget request every year, did not reply to a request for comment Wednesday.
The NNSA thinks it might cost between $1.4 billion and $5.4 billion to get pit production up and running at the Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C., by 2031. Keeping pit production at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, on the other hand, would cost $1.9 billion to $7.5 billion, and production might not come online until 2033, according to Friday’s briefing.
Meanwhile, several local governments in South Carolina have passed resolutions welcoming the NNSA’s pit mission. These localities say they want the pit work in addition to, not instead of, the massive plutonium nonproliferation mission to be handled by the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility being built at Savannah River.
However, according to the NNSA study briefed to the defense board last week, a cheaper plutonium mission is contingent on converting the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility for pit duty.
