The Department of Energy’s secretive Defense Programs Advisory Committee is scheduled meet in closed session Oct. 22-23 at agency headquarters in Washington to discuss, among other things, a classified report on plutonium aging, according to a Federal Register notice filed Friday.
The all-day committee meetings will also address finalizing the charter for a high-performance computing subcommittee, the note says.
The Defense Programs Advisory Council currently has seven Q-cleared members, including: current and former government officials, a physics professor, and a nuclear-industry executive. The group, funded by the Defense Programs Office at DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), provides classified advice about the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile, and its upkeep, to the NNSA administrator.
The agency is in the early stages of upgrading its plutonium-production infrastructure to meet the Donald Trump administration’s requirement to produce 80 new war-ready plutonium pits a year by 2030. The fissile nuclear-weapon cores will be needed for future warhead refurbishment programs.
The NNSA plans to manufacture 30 of these pits a year at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and 50 at a converted plutonium-disposal plant at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. The state has sued the NNSA in federal court to stop that plan.
Congress, meanwhile, has passed two laws recently that require the NNSA to produce a pair of reports about the agency’s plutonium strategy. A legislative report appended to the fiscal 2019 NNSA budget signed into law Friday directs the agency to report to Congress by Jan. 19 on what it will take to keep the plutonium-pit mission on schedule. About a month later, on Feb. 9, the agency would owe Congress a separate report that examines whether Los Alamos could alone meet the 80-pits-a-year requirement. The second report was directed by report language appended to the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act signed into law in August.
