The U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) would get every penny it seeks in fiscal 2020, and then some, under legislation advanced Thursday by the Senate Appropriations Committee.
The energy and water bill sent to the full Senate would give the agency just under $17 billion for the budget year starting Oct. 1: about $425 million above the Donald Trump administration’s request.
Where a House spending package passed in June would throttle back the NNSA’s work on next-generation, nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles, the Senate committee’s bill would fund the program at the requested level.
Most of the Senate committee’s extra funding shows up in the agency’s Weapons Activities account, but outside of weapons life-extension programs and stockpile stewardship. Drawing larger-than-requested budgets from the Senate were the laser-powered internal confinement fusion program, science and engineering research, and the infrastructure and operations account that funds upkeep and improvement of facilities and buildings across the nuclear security enterprise.
Notably, the Senate legislation would also give NNSA more money than it asked for to start building new infrastructure to produce fissile nuclear warhead cores. The House wanted to give the administration only around two-thirds of the plutonium-pit funding it sought.
Also unlike the House bill, the Senate committee’s measure would permit the Navy to deploy the low-yield W76-2 submarine-launched ballistic missile warhead. House Democrats have made the weapon, which they say lowers the threshold for waging nuclear war, into a national policy issue this budget season.
The full Senate had not scheduled a vote on the bill at deadline for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor. Congress plans to extend 2019 budgets into November in a stopgap continuing resolution to buy the two politically opposed chambers more time to reconcile their differing 2020 spending proposals.
At just under $16 billion, the Democrat-controlled House’s NNSA budget is about 4% lower than the $16.5 billion requested by the White House. But even the proposed House budget would be 4.5% higher than the agency’s current funding. The GOP-run Senate Appopriations Committee’s 2020 spending bill, on the other hand, would boost the agency by nearly 10%, year over year.
Since 2016, when the Barack Obama administration began the current 30-year nuclear arsenal modernization regimen, lawmakers in both parties have generally gone along with proposed spending increases on NNSA weapons programs. That has been generally true in the current appropriations cycle, too.
However, the two chambers this year disagree about the pace of the NNSA’s work on the next U.S. fleet of intercontinental ballistic missiles, known as the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD). The House approved less funding than the NNSA sought for 2020 to start build a pair of factories designed to produce 80 plutonium pits by 2030: the central components of the W87-1-style warheads that will tip the GBSD missiles the Pentagon wants to deploy beginning in 2030.
Despite internal NNSA reports that said the agency likely will not make 80 pits a year by 2030, the Senate committee on Thursday recommended $720 million for the NNSA’s Plutonium Sustainment account in 2020. That is a little more than the $710 million or so the White House requested, and 35% above the House’s recommendation for $410 million in 2020.
The Senate also met the White House’s request for $112 million for early work on the W87-1 warhead itself, including roughing out program requirements with the Air Force and maturing new technology for potential use in the weapon’s planned life extension. The House approved only about half the requested 2020 funding: around $53 million.
The NNSA plans to use 2020 Plutonium Sustainment funds to upgrade existing pit facilities at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and build a new one at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., on top of the site’s partially built Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility.
Los Alamos is scheduled to come online first, cranking out 10 W87-1-style pits annually beginning in 2024 and ramping up to 30 annually by 2030. The Savannah River plant would begin operations in 2030 and make 50 pits a year, with capacity for more.
The Senate committee’s bill is also kinder than the House’s to other NNSA nuclear materials programs, including the agency’s plan to ramp up construction of the Uranium Processing Center at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn. The facility will replace the aging Building 9212 as the NNSA’s hub for purifying highly enriched uranium, and then inserting it into the secondary stages of nuclear weapons, called canned subassemblies.
The Uranium Processing Facility would get $745 million for 2020, if the Senate committee’s bill became law. That is in line with the 2020 request and about 5.5% more than the House’s bill would provide. The lower chamber wanted to keep the Uranium Processing Facility’s budget flat around $700 million for 2020. The NNSA plans to finish the Uranium Processing Facility by 2025 at a cost of no more than $6.5 billion.
Overall, the NNSA’s Weapons Activities account would get more than $12.5 billion in the Senate bill: some $330 million more than requested and almost $1 billion more than the House mark of roughly $11.8 billion, or so.
Meanwhile, the agency’s Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation account, which funds disposal of excess U.S. plutonium as well as efforts to halt the spread of fissile materials worldwide to bad actors, would get almost $2.1 billion for 2020, under the Senate committee’s bill: more than $95 million over the request. The House bill would also provide about $2.1 billion for nonproliferation.
Critically within nonproliferation, both chambers, at last, have agreed that the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility will be closed down and converted into a pit plant. In its place, lawmakers in both chambers now have approved $79 million of funding for 2020 to start work on the facility’s replacement, the Surplus Plutonium Disposition program.
The Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility would have turned 34 metric tons of surplus plutonium into fuel for commercial reactors. Surplus Plutonium Disposition will chemically weaken the plutonium, mix it with concrete-like grout called stardust, and bury the mixture at DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.
The NNSA’s final major spending account, Naval Nuclear Reactors, would get $1.65 billion from the Senate committee: about even with the request, but down about 8.5% from 2019. The House recommended $1.63 billion for Naval Reactors for 2020. The account funds development and production of reactors and fuel for nuclear-powered warships and submarines.
