Civilian nuclear weapons programs at the Department of Energy will get almost all of the $3 billion raise the White House requested for fiscal year 2021, under the omnibus spending bill unveiled Monday.
Both chambers of Congress were scheduled to vote on the measure Monday evening.
The compromise spending package has some $19.7 billion for the DoE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA): nearly the $19.8 billion requested, over $3 billion above the 2020 appropriation of roughly $16.7 billion and around $1.7 billion more than the Democratic-controlled House proposed in an appropriations package passed over the summer.
Under the bill, the NNSA’s core programs to refurbish and maintain active nuclear weapons get the requested funding, as do the agency’s programs to build and upgrade weapons-production infrastructure in New Mexico, Tennessee and South Carolina.
The compromise bill also provides $53 million to begin work on the proposed W93 submarine-launched ballistic missile warhead: a weapon the House wanted to zero out. W93 will be a previously tested nuclear-explosive package in a new Mark 7 aeroshell designed by the Navy.
W93 will also share technology with the United Kingdom’s next submarine-launched warhead: a replacement for the Trident Holbrook that will be carried by the planned fleet of Dreadnought ballistic-missile submarines.
The Senate essentially rolled the House again in civilian nuclear budget negotiations, with the GOP-controlled upper chamber getting its way about everything from the W-93 to the controversial plutonium pit production factories the NNSA is building at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
Including upgrades to the Los Alamos pit plant, and modifications to turn the cancelled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at Savannah River into a pit factory, the omnibus has some $1.2 billion more for pits than the 2020 budget.
The NNSA plans to cast multiple war-ready pits — fissile nuclear weapon cores — starting in 2024 at Los Alamos, then ramp up to at least 80 pits a year by 2030 using both facilities. These pits will all, at least initially, be for the W87-1 warheads that will eventually tip the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent rockets that will replace existing Minuteman III nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles around 2030.
The first Ground Based Strategic Deterrent Missiles could use W87-0 warheads from the Minuteman fleet, the NNSA has said. W87-1 will be essentially a copy of the existing warhead, but with a new pit.