The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) in fiscal 2020 intends to study a nuclear-tipped, sea-launched cruise missile, and to start work to preserve the last megaton-class weapon in the U.S. arsenal, the B83 gravity bomb, according to a 2020 budget document released Friday.
The efforts are funded within the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) Directed Stockpile Work, for which the semiautonomous Department of Energy agency seeks about $5.4 billion for the budget year that begins Oct. 1. That is around 16.5 percent, or almost $770 million, higher than the 2019 appropriation of roughly $4.65 billion, according to the latest edition of DOE’s annual budget in brief.
Directed Stockpile Work includes life-extension programs and major alterations for deployed nuclear weapons, plus Stockpile Systems activities to assess the health of both active and inactive nuclear weapons. Among the inactive weapons is the B83, which was to be retired until the Donald Trump administration in 2018 proposed keeping it in a sort of warm storage.
The budget in brief is the second of three phases of the annual DOE budget rollout. The third is the annual budget justification, slated for release sometime this week. That document includes a detailed spending breakdown of nearly all the NNSA’s work. The just-released budget in brief provided a few new details to whet budget-watchers’ appetites after the agency’s initial announcement last week that it seeks a total of $16.5 billion for 2020: about 8 percent, or almost $1.5 billion, more than the 2019 appropriation.
Besides the increases in weapons work, the NNSA has also proposed spending $220 million, in line with the 2019 budget, to continue shutting down the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C. The agency wants to turn that plutonium disposal plant, which it canceled in October, into a factory that can by 2030 annually produce 50 fissile warhead cores called plutonium pits.
To get rid of the 34 metric tons of surplus plutonium the MFFF would have turned into commercial reactor fuel, the NNSA has proposed spending $79 million on a new Savannah River Site dilute-and-dispose program.
