The Department of Energy will not be able to deliver 80 new nuclear-warhead cores per year in 2030 unless it starts building new plutonium processing facilities in South Carolina by the middle of 2019, the head of the Nuclear Weapons Council said Thursday.
“From the Nuclear Weapons Council perspective, the Department of Energy (DOE) needs to start building up a plutonium processing capacity in South Carolina by early to mid-2019 to meet the requirement to produce at least 80 certified pits per year by 2030,” a spokesperson for Ellen Lord, undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, told Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor sister publication Defense Daily.
Lord chairs the joint DOD-DOE Nuclear Weapons Council, which coordinates interagency nuclear-weapons procurement and policies. The warhead cores at issue are called plutonium pits: grapefruit-sized plutonium balls that must be replaced in a warhead every 70 years or so, according to public DOE estimates.
Exactly how much progress the Defense Department expects DOE to make on a new pit factory in South Carolina by mid-2019 is not clear.
For fiscal 2019, the Energy Department requested funding only “to support design efforts and other project costs” to “restore our Nation’s capability to produce 80 WR [war reserve] pits per year in 2030 to meet pit production requirements as established by the Nuclear Weapons Council,” a spokesperson for DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) said by email Friday.
The NNSA’s budget request for the fiscal year starting Oct. 1 did not mention any South Carolina pit facility by name, but it did seek funding for “[o]ther project costs associated with preconceptual design efforts supporting the selection of a single preferred alternative for plutonium pit production beyond 30 war reserve pits per year.”
The unspecified amount of funding needed for those efforts was requested as part of the agency’s plutonium sustainment budget, for which the National Nuclear Security Administration sought a total of just over $360 million. Senate appropriators approved that request, but House appropriators suggested only about $300 million for plutonium sustainment in the next fiscal year. The 2019 DOE budget is mostly done, but still needs a final bicameral conference negotiation before it can be signed into law.
After it released its budget request, the DOE subagency identified the unfinished Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., as that single preferred alternative location for future pit production.
Meanwhile, DOE has not said whether it believes it can meet the Pentagon’s plutonium timetable. Dan Brouillette, the deputy secretary of energy, and William “Ike” White, NNSA associate principal deputy administrator, on Wednesday declined to reply to questions from the Monitor about the agency’s ability to meet the Pentagon’s timeline. Both officials were attending a meeting of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board in Washington, D.C.
In the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review published in February, the Donald Trump administration requested that DOE produce at least 80 plutonium pits a year in just over a decade. The cores are needed for ongoing weapons modernization funded by DOE and could in theory be used to build new nuclear weapons, should the White House deem that necessary and Congress approve funding.
The NNSA wants to make 30 pits a year at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico beginning in 2026, plus another 50 annually starting in 2030 at the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility. That plant is designed to turn surplus plutonium into commercial nuclear reactor fuel under an arms control pact with Russia finalized in 2010. The Energy Department has deemed the facility too expensive and this year reiterated plans to cancel the plutonium disposal mission and convert the plant into a pit factory. South Carolina is fighting the decision in federal court, where a judge has blocked DOE from ceasing construction of the MFFF.
The Energy Department’s own internal evaluations already show the agency will likely miss the 2030 pit deadline by a few years, but any delay in converting the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility for pit duty would further postpone the day the civilian agency can reach the Pentagon’s desired throughput.
Defense Daily reporter Vivienne Machi contributed to this article.
