Plans for pit-production and new warheads figure to feature in the Department of Energy’s fiscal 2019 budget request, which at deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor was still expected to be released Monday.
While no details had leaked out as of Friday, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) appeared well positioned for a budget increase, provided Congress can approve a budget on time. Last year, the Donald Trump administration requested a roughly $1-billion-a-year budget spike for the quasi-autonomous DOE nuclear weapons agency, which would have provided the NNSA with a roughly $14 billion budget for 2018.
This year as budget day approaches, the administration is fresh off the release of a Nuclear Posture Review that calls for a more aggressive nuclear deterrence policy, and for the NNSA to produce two new-ish submarine-launched warheads from parts in the existing stockpile.
In addition, the agency has mused on moving production of pits — the fissile cores of nuclear weapons — to the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. South Carolina lawmakers have latched on to the idea, but not if it means giving up the planned plutonium arms-reduction mission planned there at the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility. The NNSA has proposed turning the facility into a pits-only plant.
New Mexico lawmakers, meanwhile, remain stridently opposed to moving the pit mission away from Los Alamos.
The 2019 budget request will, administration officials have said publicly, have more information about both the new warheads and the NNSA’s pit plans.
Congress was willing to grant most of the requested increase for the agency last summer before budget negotiations broke down and DOE was funded under a series of stopgap budgets that have frozen spending at 2017 levels through March 23.
Notably, lawmakers were not keen to pour money into one of the administration’s top priorities, and one of the NNSA’s longest-standing budgetary bugbears: eliminating infrastructure throughout the DOE weapons complex the NNSA no longer needs for active nuclear-weapon missions.
The White House wanted $250 million to turn unneeded NNSA facilities over to DOE’s Office of Environmental Management for cleanup. The House was willing to fund only $75 million worth of transfers, while the Senate offered just $55 million.
At any rate, the request itself would barely make a dent in the NNSA’s complex-wide infrastructure challenges. The agency estimates it has racked up more than $2.5 billion in deferred maintenance costs to date, all but ensuring infrastructure issues new and old will haunt civilian-operated nuclear weapons programs for many presidential administrations to come.
