Members of the joint Department of Energy-Pentagon body that coordinates nuclear weapon procurements were set to testify late this afternoon before a Senate Armed Services panel.
The six-member Nuclear Weapons Council is dominated by Pentagon personnel and chaired by the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment — William LaPlante, in the Joe Biden administration.
The sole council member from the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is Administrator Jill Hruby, who was set to appear before the Senate Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee for the second late-afternoon hearing in as many weeks.
The council also includes top military brass: Adm. Christopher Grady, the No. 2 uniformed official and vice chair of the joint chiefs of staff, and Adm. Charles Richard, commander of U.S. Strategic Command, the multi-service branch that controls the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
The hearing was scheduled to begin at 4:30 p.m. Eastern time.
Aside from coordinating NNSA and Pentagon procurements so that new weapons, delivery vehicles and carrier craft will all be ready at the same time, the Nuclear Weapons Council also gets a sort of sign-off power on the Department of Energy’s budget each year.
If the council decides, prior to the publication of the DOE budget, that the request proposed for NNSA is not sufficient to meet military requirements, the council may suggest to Congress which parts of DOE should take a cut to shore up the NNSA.
The council’s near-term worry is the NNSA’s burgeoning pit-production enterprise, which is under construction but behind schedule. The planned Los Alamos Plutonium Pit Production Project, NNSA says, will be able to cast at least 30 pits annually by 2026, as the military currently requires.
On the other hand, the planned Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., will not be able to start casting at least 50 pits a year by 2030, NNSA acknowledged in 2021. The agency in 2018 got permission to turn Savannah River’s incomplete plutonium recycling plant into a pit-casting factory and had hoped the new facility would be ready by the turn of the next decade.
Last week, Hruby told Sen. Angus King (D-Maine), the chair of the Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee, that the planned pit factories were a hedge against plutonium aging, that the NNSA could use old pits in new weapons in a real pinch and that the Nuclear Weapons Council was still “sorting out” the military requirements for pit production.
