National Nuclear Security Administrator Jill Hruby and the senior leadership of the Department of Energy’s semiautonomous nuclear weapons agency were set to testify before Senate appropriators at 10 a.m. Eastern time on Wednesday morning.
The scheduled hearing before the Senate Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee will be among the final hearings of the season before lawmakers get to work writing the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) fiscal year 2023 budget bills.
For the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1, the NNSA requested about $21.4 billion, or nearly $755 million more than Congress appropriated for 2022 in an omnibus spending bill passed halfway through the fiscal year in March.
Most of the increase goes to NNSA’s bread-and-butter nuclear-weapon refurbishments, including major life extension programs and alterations. Within the weapons budget, most of the requested increase is for construction of a pair of plutonium pit factories: one at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and one at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
The NNSA budget requests no funding to extend the life of the B83 megaton-capable nuclear gravity bomb or to work on a warhead for a low-yield sea-launched cruise missile.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chair of the Senate Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee, opposed both B83 and the planned air-launched cruise missile whose warhead, the W80-4 being developed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, would be the basis for the tip of the sea-launched weapon the Joe Biden administration wants to cancel.
