The Senate adjourned for the week Thursday without passing a 2019 National Defense Authorization Act that would authorize work on a new low-yield, submarine-launched ballistic missile warhead, and delay the National Nuclear Security Administration’s plan to begin producing plutonium pits in South Carolina.
A report appended to the massive military policy bill would also ratchet up official scrutiny of a major industry contract to manage a pair of nuclear-weapon production sites.
The House passed its version of the National Defense Authorization Act in May, and the two chambers’ bills must be reconciled into a compromise measure before President Donald Trump can sign the legislation into law. At deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor, the Senate was set for more procedural votes on its defense bill late Monday.
In its marquee act, the Senate’s National Defense Authorization Act provides $65 million for the low-yield weapon, which the Trump administration directed the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to build as part of its Nuclear Posture Review. The new weapon would be a dialed-down version of the W76 now used on Trident II D5 ballistic missiles carried by Ohio-class submarines. The NNSA plans to build the weapon during the final stages of an otherwise unrelated program to extend the service life of the full-yield W76.
The low-yield weapon would be funded in 2019 with money the Trump administration requested for the ongoing life-extension program that produced the first upgraded W76 in 2008 and is slated to produce its last in the budget year that begins Oct. 1. That would leave the original W76 life-extension program with about $50 million for 2019: the same amount the House and Senate Appropriations committees approved in 2019 spending bills.
The bill would also removes a requirement that the Department of Energy secure permission from Congress to begin designing future low-yield warheads: a law put in place as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for 2004.
Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, plans to offer an amendment to the 2019 act to preserved the requirement for Congressional approval.
The Trump Nuclear Posture Review also calls on the Pentagon and the NNSA to study a possible low-yield, sea-launched cruise missile. The administration contends the U.S. needs low-yield weapons to deter Russia from using similarly powerful weapons to win a conflict it starts, but cannot finish, with conventional arms.
Congressional opponents of low-yield warheads, mostly Democrats, say the current U.S. nuclear arsenal would sufficiently deter nuclear-armed rivals. These lawmakers, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), say low-yield warheads would increase the odds that the U.S. uses a nuclear weapon in combat.
Meanwhile, the Senate bill would throw a serious wrench into the NNSA’s plan to produce plutonium pits, fissile warhead cores, in both Aiken, S.C. and Los Alamos, N.M.
The bill forbids the agency from canceling the over-budget Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) under construction at the Savannah River Site. The agency wants to turn this plutonium-disposal facility into a factory capable of making 50 pits a year by 2030, but it first had to certify there was some other means of dealing with 34 metric tons of surplus, weapon-usable plutonium MFFF was supposed to turn into commercial reactor fuel.
Energy Secretary Rick Perry made that certification in May, telling Congress an alternative called dilute-and-dispose — chemically weakening the plutonium at proposed Savannah River Sites, suspending it in concrete-like grout called Stardust, and burying the mixture deep underground at DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M. — would cost around $20 billion, compared with about $50 billion to finish the MFFF.
Senate Armed Services Committee member Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a fierce proponent of the MFFF, did not buy Perry’s math. Graham inserted language into the Senate’s NDAA to block any cancellation of the facility, and in the bill report ordered the U.S. comptroller general to double-check DOE’s math on the cost.
Specifically, the bill report would require a federally funded research and development center to examine the NNSA’s cost estimates for four different pit-production strategies from an April engineering analysis that leaked to the press in May. The analysis, by Parsons Government Services, compared DOE’s preferred option of splitting production between a converted MFFF and Los Alamos National Laboratory with three Los Alamos-only options.
The report on the Parsons engineering analysis would be due to to Congress no later than Oct. 11, the committee wrote in its bill report. The report must be in the NNSA’s hands by Oct. 1, the Senate Armed Services Committee said.
Also to face scrutiny from the comptroller general, should the Senate’s defense bill become law, is the management and operations contract for the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., and the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas.
In a controversial money-saving move, the NNSA in 2013 combined management of those crucial weapons facilities into a single contract held by the Bechtel-led Consolidated Nuclear Security. Now, the Senate Armed Services Committee wants to know how much money the deal saved. The NNSA envisioned the common contract would eliminate redundancies such as financial reporting and administration, saving the government hundreds of millions of dollars over the life of the contract.
The pact also included an option for Consolidated Nuclear Security to take over the NNSA’s tritium work, currently centered at Savannah River Site. That option has not been picked up, and the White House’s budget projections call for continued investment in tritium programs at Savannah River.
The contract’s five-year base period is set to expire June 30, 2019. The NNSA holds a pair of two-year options and a one-year option that would extend Consolidated Nuclear Security contract through part of 2024, but the agency has to prove that combining management of Y-12 and Pantex saved money before it can pick up those options.
