New Year’s is the time to take the measure of the 12 months to come, as much for those who watch the Department of Energy’s nuclear-weapons programs as anyone else. So, in the spirit of the season, this volume of Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor begins with a list of things to expect for the department’s National Nuclear Security Administration in 2018.
Permanent senior leadership for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), including a new administrator.
There’s a rough a timetable for the top spot: in late December, the Donald Trump administration nominated longtime national- and nuclear-security wonk Lisa Gordon-Hagerty to be NNSA’s fifth full-time administrator. Past administrators-designate have taken two or three months, on average, to be confirmed in the Senate.
Gordon-Hagerty first must pass muster in a confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, which will decide whether to recommend her to the full Senate for a final vote. At deadline Friday, the committee had not scheduled a nomination hearing.
A veteran of both the Department of Energy and the National Security Council, Gordon-Hagerty has served in Democratic and Republican administrations. Her nomination late last year drew praise from a few former feds with nuclear and national-security experience.
Aside from Gordon-Hagerty, there are three glaring vacancies in NNSA’s senior leadership. First, there is no deputy administrator to back up the administrator. Madelyn Creedon, deputy to current NNSA chief Frank Klotz, departed in January after Trump took office and wasn’t replaced.
Further down the chain of command, NNSA’s Defense Programs and Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation offices also need permanent heads. Philip Calbos and David Huizenga, who were respectively the acting deputy administrators of these offices, had to step down from their interim leadership roles after November because of federal laws that limit the time temporary managers may serve.
At deadline Friday, The White House had not nominated a new deputy NNSA administrator, nor full-time assistant deputy administrators for the two vacant offices helmed by Calbos and Huizenga. Those two were still the full-time number-twos in their respective NNSA stovepipes, at deadline for this issue.
The 2018 Nuclear Posture Review.
This is bigger than the NNSA or DOE, but it’s on this list because U.S. nuclear-weapons policy drives the NNSA’s warhead, stockpile, and nonproliferation programs — not vice-versa. The Pentagon publishes a Nuclear Posture Review every fourth midterm-election year and the next is expected in mid-January. Some experts believe it will recommend a more aggressive nuclear strategy that brandishes U.S capabilities more obviously than in the Barack Obama years. The full report to Congress is classified, but the public gets a scrubbed version.
The Donald Trump administration’s plan to “modernize” DOE and NNSA.
Not to be confused with the ongoing DOD/DOE nuclear arsenal modernization program.
Exactly what this entails for the NNSA remains a mystery, probably not to be unraveled until the White House’s publishes its fiscal 2019 budget request. But some clues could drop as soon as next week, when the House Energy and Commerce Committee plans a hearing titled “DOE Modernization: Advancing DOE’s Mission For National, Economic, And Energy Security Of The United States.” NNSA Administrator Klotz is on the witness list.
One thing to watch for in that hearing: the NNSA’s plans for its plutonium infrastructure. Specifically, the infrastructure needed to manufacture plutonium pits: the fissile cores of nuclear warheads. The agency is examining moving production to the Savannah River Site at Aiken, S.C., from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. An internal study that leaked in part to the press showed the agency studied converting the unfinished Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at Savannah River into a pit plant.
Lawmakers from New Mexico hate the plan and claim DOE’s study — which shows moving pit operations to South Carolina could be cheaper than keeping it in New Mexico — is full of bad math piled on illogical assumptions.
The 2019 budget request.
Past precedent and present gossip suggest the details of the White House’s DOE modernization plan will be packed into the agency’s fiscal 2019 budget request. The administration must by law send its budget request to Congress in the first week of February, but presidents of both parties routinely blow the deadline.
A real 2018 budget.
Before we get to 2019, there’s the small matter of the next three quarters of fiscal 2018.
For now, under the continuing resolution that funds the government through Jan. 19, the NNSA keeps its $13-billion-a-year-equivalent top line from 2017. At deadline Friday, Republicans and Democrats in the Senate had only just staked out positions for the next phase of budget negotiations.
Maybe those negotiations will result in a permanent spending bill that grants the NNSA the nearly $1-billion-a-year raise the Trump administration requested. Maybe they will result in a long-term continuing resolution that freezes this year’s budget at last year’s level clear through Sept. 30. Maybe things will go like they did in fiscal 2017, when Congress passed continuing resolutions until May, then wrote a permanent budget with more than half the fiscal year gone.
The tough part of this deadlock, if you’re the NNSA, is that Congress was essentially willing to grant the administration’s request for a big budget increase in 2018. Last summer, the House and Senate both finished DOE budget bills that would have provided more money for the agency’s weapons programs. However, the bills weren’t reconciled and budget negotiations broke down, forcing the first of three continuing resolutions for the current fiscal year.
Potential disposition of excess NNSA facilities to the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management.
The Trump administration, in one of the first budget documents it ever released, made clear that the NNSA should get to transfer old infrastructure it no longer needs to DOE’s Office of Environmental Management: the agency’s legacy nuclear-cleanup office. The administration wanted $225 million to transfer excess NNSA facilities for cleanup in 2018. The House went much lower at $75 million, and the Senate went lower than that: $55 million.
This is a perennial issue that, under projected federal budgets, will outlast many presidential administrations.
A new management and operations contractor for the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Incumbent Los Alamos National Security, the partnership led by longtime lab-prime University of California and Bechtel National, will be off the job Sept. 30. The Energy Department plans to announce the new contractor in April or May. Confirmed bidders are: the University of California, the University of Texas, and Texas A&M University.
None of the confirmed bidders have identified teammates.
Of the corporate partners in the incumbent, only BWX Technologies has confirmed it wants in on the next contract. Bechtel National and AECOM have declined to comment, though a source said AECOM did not bid.
Honeywell, a big winner on NNSA bids last year, has confirmed it did not bid on the latest Los Alamos management contract.
A master plan, including a schedule, for overhauling the NNSA’s uranium programs.
But don’t hold your breath. The agency has said it aims to release the master schedule on Dec. 31 of this year. Concurrent with and a key part of this next-generation uranium überdocument are…
Schedule milestones for the Uranium Processing Facility Bechtel is building at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
The new plant will be completed by 2025, the NNSA has promised Congress — provided the requested funding materializes. A clearer schedule should be nailed down by March, when the agency expects to establish a cost and schedule baseline for the facility’s Main Process Building. That is according to the Trump administration’s 2018 budget request.
The Bechtel-built facility will replace a legacy uranium-enrichment plant that dates to World War II and — as the sole manufacturing hub for the uranium-based secondary stages of nuclear warheads — will be a cornerstone of the 30-year nuclear modernization program initiated in 2016 by the Barack Obama administration.
Construction of a new office building in Albuquerque, N.M., to replace the aging NNSA office there.
Last on this list, but probably not least to the roughly 1,200 people who would work there, is a new office building to replace an aging NNSA facility near Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico. Maybe not as big as some of the items above, but at an estimated $100 million to $250 million to construct, big enough. The building to be replaced is 1940s-vintage, which makes it older than most of the people who worked at the NNSA last year.
One small detail: while the National Defense Authorization Act of 2018 authorized Congress to fund the new Albuquerque Complex, House and Senate appropriators who write DOE’s budget are fighting over whether to actually cut the check NNSA requested.
