WASHINGTON — Territorial snarling over Department of Energy plutonium programs imparted some edge to an otherwise cordial nomination hearing here Thursday, where President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) said production of nuclear-weapon cores would be her top priority if she is confirmed.
“We do need to have a robust program to ensure that we can make pits,” as the cores are known, Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, administrator-designate for the $13-billion-a-year agency, told the Senate Armed Services Committee. Building new production infrastructure and turning it on in time to crank out 80 pits by 2030 “would be my No. 1 priority,” she said.
Trump nominated Gordon-Hagerty, a government consultant with nuclear and national security chops from previous federal service, on Dec. 19. If confirmed, she would be the first woman and the fifth person to lead the semiautonomous Department of Energy branch on a full-time basis since Congress created it in 2000.
No lawmaker at Thursday’s hearing said they would oppose Gordon-Hagerty’s confirmation. Even Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) — who took issue with Gordon-Hagerty’s position that it would be cheaper to cancel a big nuclear nonproliferation construction project in his state than to continue it — said she is “well-qualified” to run the NNSA.
To advance to the Senate floor for the confirmation vote that would make her NNSA administrator, Gordon-Hagerty needs support from a majority of the Senate Armed Services Committee. The panel could as soon as next week hold a business meeting that might include a vote on Gordon-Hagerty’s nomination, one source said.
It took the Senate about two to three months to confirm the previous four NNSA administrators.
Settling the agency’s pit-production plans could put Gordon-Hagerty, if confirmed, in the uncomfortable position of choosing between DOE’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and South Carolina’s Savannah River Site.
Thursday’s hearing offered a preview of that discomfort, as Graham and Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), pressed the nominee about her plans for the major weapon sites in their states.
The stage for that standoff was set last year, when it leaked out that the NNSA believed it might be able to make plutonium pits cheaper and faster if the agency converted the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) under construction at Savannah River Site for the job.
The leak simultaneously drew the ire of Graham, who wants the MFFF to continue with its planned plutonium conversion mission, and Heinrich, who wants new pit production to remain at Los Alamos as currently planned.
Graham told Gordon-Hagerty he would “fight like crazy” to prevent the Trump administration from abandoning MFFF’s current mission to turn 34 metric tons of weapon-grade plutonium into commercial reactor fuel under an arms control agreement with Russia negotiated by the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations.
The Trump administration, like the Obama administration, wants to cancel the MOX plant in favor of a currently unfunded “dilute and dispose” approach to the arms-control mission. In that scenario, the NNSA would spend hundreds of millions of dollars to build new infrastructure at Savannah River to dilute the plutonium intended for the MFFF and mix it with concrete-like grout for eventual burial at DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.
Graham did not comment about the pit mission Thursday, but earlier this week his staff confirmed he supported bringing the pit mission to South Carolina as a complement to MFFF.
CB&I AREVA MOX Services began work on MFFF in 2000 and started physically building the facility in 2007. The company’s contract with the NNSA was rebaselined in 2012, at which time the contractor thought the plant would be built in late 2018. However, even the most optimistic estimates publicly available show the facility will not be finished until the mid-2020s. The NNSA has already spent about $5 billion on the MFFF.
After Graham had his say, Heinrich went on the defense for the Los Alamos pit mission. Repeating claims his office first made to Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor in December, the junior senator from the Land of Enchantment said the NNSA’s leaked pit study unfairly compared nonexistent infrastructure in Savannah River — the repurposed MFFF — with a long-abandoned concept for a pit plant at Los Alamos that the agency no longer intends to build.
“Does that make sense to you?” Heinrich asked Gordon-Hagerty.
“Senator, how you describe it does not make sense to me,” Gordon-Hagerty said. “[B]ut I am committed, if confirmed, to take a look at all of the relevant data, current and past data, and the plutonium analysis of alternatives, and commit to you that I will look at it from an objective viewpoint.”
The exchanges with Graham and Heinrich represented essentially all of the friction Gordon-Hagerty faced Thursday. Besides those interactions, noted hawk Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) sought to impress upon Gordon-Hagerty the seriousness of the job for which she has been nominated. Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) asked Gordon-Hagerty to pay special attention to nuclear nonproliferation, which he thought was particularly important to preventing North Korea from selling special nuclear material to unfriendly actors.
After the hearing, Heinrich’s office declined to comment about Gordon-Hagerty’s testimony, or commit to supporting her confirmation. Graham’s office did not reply to multiple requests for comment this week.
Gordon-Hagerty herself appeared upbeat after the roughly 90-minute hearing.
Speaking briefly to Nuclear Security and Deterrence Monitor after the proceedings, the former DOE and National Security Council staffer she would be “honored to serve in the Department of Energy NNSA” and that she “will visit every single site” in the NNSA complex if confirmed.
