The head of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s naval reactors program, steward of the heavy-industry programs that provide nuclear propulsion systems for the Navy, is scheduled to speak Wednesday to industry and press just outside Washington, D.C., at the 36th annual Naval Submarine League conference.
Adm. James Caldwell is on the slate for a half-hour “update to members and industry,” according to the agenda for the program. The Naval Submarine League’s Symposium and Industry Update will be held this year at the Hyatt Regency Crystal City at Reagan National Airport in Arlington, Va.
Caldwell is set to take the podium amid rising development costs for the next-generation Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine and partisan acrimony in Washington about the ballistic-missile submarine fleet’s nuclear mission.
The Navy estimates it will cost about $130 billion to develop and deploy 12 Columbia-class submarines to replace the 14 Ohio-class submarines now patrolling the globe with a cache of nuclear-tipped Trident II-D5 ballistic missiles capable of delivering the Department of Energy-built W76 warhead to essentially any target on the planet.
Expenses have been rising — a little under 10 percent between 2017 and 2018 — because Navy “program officials were able to better forecast costs as the program matured,” the Government Accountability Office said in a Nov. 2 report. “The Navy also reported additional planned funding, such as military construction funding, and an increase in procurement funding,” according to the congressional auditing agency.
General Dynamics [GD] Electric Boat, Groton, Connecticut, is developing the first Columbia sub under a roughly $5 billion prime contract awarded in 2017 by Naval Sea Systems Command. The first Columbia-class vessel is slated to go on patrol in the early 2030s.
Each Columbia-class boat will carry 16 nuclear-tipped Trident missiles, compared with up to 24 carried by the current Ohio fleet. Some of those missiles could be equipped with a low-yield variant of the W76 that DoE started developing in the current budget year.
Meanwhile, Caldwell will also have a little good, if old, news to share before the friendly crowd: the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Uranium Processing Facility, which will shape uranium for weapons and naval reactors, has been under construction since late March at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn. The facility also received the $700 million the White House requested for it in fiscal year 2019.