The Senate Armed Services Committee has demanded that the National Nuclear Security Administration come up with a “comprehensive strategy” for disposing of nuclear waste created by the ongoing 30-year refresh of U.S. nuclear weapons.
The provision is part of the committee’s fiscal year 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the full text of which the committee released late last week. If the bill becomes law, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) will have to brief both the committee and the Government Accountability Office about the agency’s five- 10- and 25-year plans to process, ship and dispose of radioactive waste from the modernization programs.
The NNSA’s plans to cast new plutonium pits at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Savannah River Site will generate new streams of transuranic waste that will have to go to the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M. If that facility is not available, NNSA officials have said, it could affect the agency’s ability to meet military deadlines for new pits.
The NNSA waste report ordered up by the bill — which must be reconciled with a 2022 NDAA the House passed last week — would have to include the quantity of waste expected to result from modernization activities across the nuclear security enterprise and the funding required to deal with it, according to bill language released by the Senate Appropriations Committee.
The full Senate had not scheduled a floor vote for the committee’s NDAA at deadline for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor.
