The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration would get every penny it sought in fiscal year 2020 and then some, under a Senate Appropriations Committee bill that would give the agency just under $17 billion: some $425 million above the Trump administration’s request.
Where a House spending package passed in June would throttle back the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) work on next-generation, nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles, the Senate committee’s bill would fund the effort at the requested level.
Also unlike the House bill, the Senate committee’s bill would permit the Navy to deploy the low-yield, W76-2 submarine-launched ballistic missile warhead.
The full Senate had not scheduled a vote on the bill at deadline for Defense Daily. Congress plans to extend 2019 budgets into November to buy the two politically opposed chambers more time to reconcile their differing 2020 spending proposals.
The Democrat-controlled House’s NNSA budget is about 4% lower than what the White House request, but even that would be 4.5% higher than the NNSA’s 2019 budget. The GOP-run Senate Committee’s 2020 spending bill, on the other hand, would boost the agency nearly 10%, year-over-year for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1.
Generally, Congress supports NNSA spending increases projected since 2016, when the Obama administration began the current 30-year nuclear modernization regimen.
However, the chambers disagree about the pace of the NNSA’s work on the U.S. fleet of intercontinental ballistic missiles, known as the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD). The House approved less funding than the NNSA sought for 2020 to start building a pair of factories designed to produce 80 fissile warhead cores called plutonium pits by 2030: the central components of the W87-1-style warheads that will tip the GBSD missiles slated to deploy beginning in 2030.
Despite internal NNSA reports that said 80 pits a year by 2030 is unlikely, the Senate committee on Thursday recommended $720 million for the NNSA’s Plutonium Sustainment account in 2020. That’s a little more than the $710 million or so the White House requested, and 35% above the House’s recommendation for $410 million in 2020.
The Senate also met the White House’s request for $112 million for early work on the W87-1 warhead itself. The House approved only about half the requested 2020 funding: around $53 million.
NNSA plans to use 2020 Plutonium Sustainment funds to upgrade existing pit facilities at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and build a new one at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., on top of the site’s partially built Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility.
Los Alamos is scheduled to come online first, cranking out 10 W87-1-style pits a year beginning in 2024 and ramping up to 30 annually by 2030. The Savannah River plant would come online in 2030 and make 50 pits a year, with a capacity for more.
The Senate committee’s bill is also kinder than the House’s to other NNSA nuclear materials programs, including the agency’s project to ramp up construction of the Uranium Processing Center at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn. The facility will replace the aging Building 9212 as the NNSA’s hub for purifying highly enriched uranium, and then inserting it into the secondary stages of nuclear weapons, called canned subassemblies.
The Uranium Processing Facility would get $745 million for 2020, if the Senate committee’s bill became law. That is in line with the 2020 request and about 5.5% more than the House’s bill would provide. The lower chamber wanted to keep the Uranium Processing Facility’s budget flat for 2020.
The other major NNSA spending accounts also would do better under the Senate committee’s bill than under the House’s.
The agency’s Defense Nuclear Nonproliferaiton account, which funds disposal of excess U.S. plutonium as well as efforts to halt the spread of fissile materials worldwide to bad actors, would get almost $2.1 billion for 2020, under the Senate committee’s bill: $160 million above the 2020 budget and more than $95 million over the request. The House bill would also provide about $2.1 billion for nonproliferaiton.
Critically within nonproliferation, both chambers, at last, have agreed that the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility will be closed down and converted into a pit plant. In its place, lawmakers in both chambers now have approved the facility’s replacement, the Surplus Plutonium Disposition program.
The Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility would have turned 34 metric tons of surplus plutonium into fuel for commercial reactions. Surplus Plutonium Disposition will chemically weaken the plutonium, mix it with concrete-like grout called stardust, and bury the mixture at DoE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.
The NNSA’s final major spending account, Naval Nuclear Reactors program, would get $1.65 billion from the Senate committee: about even with the request, but down about 8.5% from 2019. The House recommended $1.63 billion for Naval Reactors for 2020. The account funds development and production of reactors and fuel for nuclear-powered warships and submarines.