The Senate on Thursday unanimously approved Brent Park to lead the National Nuclear Security Administration’s roughly $2-billion-a-year nuclear nonproliferation branch.
It took the Senate a little over a month to confirm Park, a physicist and associate director at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, as deputy administrator for defense nuclear nonproliferation. President Donald Trump nominated Park on Feb. 13.
Park had not been sworn in at deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor.
As the leader of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) Office of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation, Park will lead agency programs to prevent the spread of weaponizable nuclear material globally. These include domestic and international efforts to replace weapon-grade material powering research reactors with non-weapon-grade material, and training law enforcement to detect and respond to potential acts of radiological terrorism.
One of the most controversial things on Park’s plate, once he is officially on the job, will be the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) under construction at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. The facility is designed to turn 34 metric tons of weapon-usable plutonium into commercial reactor fuel under an arms control pact with Russia, but the NNSA wants to cancel the plant and process the plutonium elsewhere at Savannah River.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) opposes the idea and, during Park’s confirmation hearing on March 1, asked the nominee to visit Savannah River, appraise contractor CB&I AREVA MOX Services’ progress in building the MFFF, and report back to the Senate Armed Services Committee. Park said that, if confirmed, he would make the visit one of his “highest priorities.”
Meanwhile, the NNSA is already working on congressionally mandated paperwork required to shut down the plant and proceed with the alternative: diluting plutonium in South Carolina and burying it deep underground in New Mexico.
The NNSA’s nonproliferation budget has been on a roller-coaster ride this year. The Trump administration proposed a roughly 5-percent budget cut for the office in 2018, but the omnibus spending bill that passed Congress this week would increase the office’s 2018 budget to $1.9 billion: 6 percent more than the 2017 appropriation and more than 10 percent above the request.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s 2019 funding request — which was written before Congress erased caps on federal spending earlier this year — would cut nonproliferation spending back almost 7 percent to $1.8 billion. That is about the level at which Congress was prepared to fund those programs in draft 2018 appropriations bills they produced last summer, when spending limits were still in place.
