The Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday passed a spending bill that would give the National Nuclear Security Administration nearly $2 billion more than the $22.1 billion the White House sought and almost exactly the $24 billion the House has proposed.
The bill, approved 29-0 by the committee, also includes larger-than-requested appropriations for plutonium pit factories planned for South Carolina but does not follow the House Appropriations Committee’s plan to greatly increase funding for the overbudget Uranium Processing Facility in Tennessee.
Overall, about $18.8 billion is included in the Senate Appropriations Committee’s 2024 spending bill for NNSA nuclear-weapon programs.That is a $1.7 billion increase over the current fiscal year and in line with the White House’s request.
A companion spending bill the House Appropriations Committee passed on June 22 has a little more than $19 billion for weapons activities.
Though the House and Senate committees each agree on higher-than-requested funding for the planned plutonium pit facility at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, the House recommended more funding. Neither committee matched the 2023 budget for the facility, which will pair with a smaller plant at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
For fiscal year 2024, the Senate committee calls for roughly $1 billion for plutonium pit production at the Savannah River National Site in South Carolina: about $142 million more than requested, $230 million below the 2023 appropriation and $128 million less than what House appropriators recommended. Plutonium pit production at the Los Alamos National Laboratory would get an additional $211 million under the Senate spending plan, for a total of $1.7 billion where the Biden Administration asked for $1.54 billion in fiscal year 2024.
The Senate committee also prescribed at least $10 million for next-generation machining and assembly technology development for high-volume pit production.
Although supportive of pit production “in recognition of new threats and challenges maintaining readiness on aging systems,” the Senate wants accountability for the money spent on the ambitious effort to build at least 80 plutonium pits per year by the 2030s at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
“The Committee believes that NNSA is not fully accounting for risk to schedule and cost for its two-site pit production strategy,” the bill reads. “The Committee previously directed, in the fiscal year 2023 Act, NNSA to provide a plan to establish a two-site Integrated Master Schedule covering the entirety of the work required to produce 80 pits per year and a timeline that NNSA has high confidence will achieve this critical requirement.”
Congress wants that plan as soon as the appropriations bill becomes law.
Elsewhere in NNSA infrastructure modernization, the chambers differed greatly about whether to give the agency more money than it requested for the Uranium Processing Facility, where cost overruns have drawn the ire of appropriators.
For the Uranium Processing Facility, the Senate committee proposed some $760 million, about even with the request and nearly $450 million lower than what their House counterparts approved, according to a bill summary published July 20.
In June, a Democratic appropriator from each chamber sent the NNSA a sternly worded letter objecting to the agency’s plans to make up for cost overruns at the Uranium Processing Facility by shuffling funds into the project from other programs.
The House committee’s bill provides $2.59 billion to support nuclear nonproliferation programs, and the Senate did the same, a $106 million increase over fiscal year 2023. It also funds efforts to secure radiological materials in the U.S. and abroad, the installation of radiological detection equipment at border crossings and seaports around the world, and research and development activities on nuclear proliferation and detonation detection.
Under the House appropriations plan, nuclear nonproliferation would receive about $2.4 billion, nearly $130 million less than requested.
