WASHINGTON — The National Nuclear Security Administration’s Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation office needs to end programs that have served their purpose, the head of that office told a panel of scientists here this week.
“We know how to start a project, but we don’t know how to kill it,” Brent Park, NNSA deputy administrator for defense nuclear nonproliferation, said Wednesday in an open meeting of the National Academies Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board. “We need to learn to declare success.”
He was responding to a question from board member William Tobey, who from 2006 to 2009 held the position Park holds now, about the Donald Trump administration’s proposed cuts within NNSA defense nuclear nonproliferation operations.
Park did not say exactly which programs are past what he considers their logical sunset dates, but the White House’s fiscal 2020 budget request points a finger.
The overall NNSA nonproliferation budget would actually rise 3% to about $2 billion, under the Trump administration’s request. However, the agency’s Global Material Security account, which seeks to secure fissile and radioactive materials from terrorists worldwide, would be cut about 15% to some $340 million.
Domestic and international radiological security programs would take the biggest whack of all, if the White House’s plan becomes law: roughly 30% and 23%, respectively, for 2020 budgets of about $90 million and $60 million.
The cuts, Park told the National Academies, reflect a wind-down of the NNSA’s program to replace blood sterilization machines in hospitals that use the potentially dangerous cesium-137 isotope with machines that use X-rays instead. The effort is part of the agency’s Cesium Irradiator Replacement Project, or CIRP.
“My goodness, you can do terrible things with cesium,” Park said, referring to the possibility of bad actors seizing the material to create the sort of radioactive dispersal device sometimes called a dirty bomb.
Congress gave the agency $40 million more than it sought for the program over “the last year or two or three,” Park said. Now, with many cesium irradiators replaced — Park did not say how many — Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation does not need to spend as much money replacing the machines, or safeguarding them while healthcare facilities transitioned to X-ray devices.
Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), chair of the House Appropriations panel that will write the first draft of the NNSA’s 2020 budget bill, is concerned that the agency wants to shrink nonproliferation spending while plowing more money into nuclear weapons programs. NNSA Weapons Activities would get about $12.5 billion for fiscal 2020 if the budget request became law: about a 12% boost, compared with the 2019 budget.
Asked by Tobey if defense nuclear nonproliferation could use more funding than what the White House seeks for the budget year beginning Oct. 1, Park said, “We’re OK.”
