Only the most recent person to acknowledge them, Navy Vice Adm. Charles Richard, the Trump administration’s nominee to lead U.S. Strategic Command, on Thursday told the Senate Armed Services Committee that there are “issues“ with the National Nuclear Security Administration’s plan to produce 80 new nuclear weapon cores a year by 2030.
“That requirement is sound,” Richard said, but “there are issues in terms of [the Department of Energy’s] ability to meet that, and I would pledge to look very closely at that, if I was confirmed.”
Charles, nominated to replace Air Force Gen. John Hyten, who was confirmed in September but has not yet been sworn in as vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was drawn into a brief exchange about plutonium pits during his Senate Armed Services confirmation hearing by Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.): the ranking member of the panel’s strategic forces subcommittee, and a stalwart ally of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Richard did not actually answer the question Heinrich asked him: “how confident are you that the NNSA will meet that [80-pits-a-year] requirement?”
DoE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) plans to make 80 pits annually by 2030, including 30 a year at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and 50 annually at the planned Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
The NNSA plans to start with 10 pits a year at Los Alamos in 2024, once the lab’s PF-4 Plutonium Facility is expanded and upgraded with new equipment to handle the work, according to the agency’s current plans.
The Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility, which would be built from the partially completed Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, would nominally come online in 2030, though the NNSA has spent all year reminding lawmakers what a challenge it will be to hit that level of throughput only 11 years from now.
Congress still has to approve funding for the Savannah River pit mission. The Senate is on board and this summer produced authorization and appropriations bills that would provide the $720 million the NNSA says it needs for fiscal year 2020 to start crucial work on the new pit plant. However, House bills have provided only about two thirds the amount of funding for the proposed South Carolina pit work.
In addition, independent reports funded by the NNSA itself have concluded that Los Alamos, even with upgrades, might not be able to produce 30 pits a year until after 2030.
In Thursday’s confirmation hearing, Heinrich called producing 80 pits a year a “secondary goal.” It was not clear what he meant, and his office did not reply to a request for clarification Friday, at deadline for sister publication Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor. The NNSA has framed 80 pits a year, a number hashed out by the joint DoE-Pentagon Nuclear Weapons Council, as its one and only goal.
An NNSA spokesperson did not immediately reply to a request for comment Friday. The agency’s initial batch of pits will be for W87-1-style nuclear warheads, suitable for use on future Ground Based Strategic Deterrent intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Meanwhile, Richard’s confirmation hearing went more or less smoothly. Lawmakers have not said when they might advance his nomination to the full Senate for final approval, but Armed Services Chair James Inhofe (R-Okla.) said at the end of the hearing that he looked forward to working with Richard in his new capacity.
Before his current assignment, Richard was deputy commander of Strategic Command, led Submarine Group 10, directed Undersea Warfare (OPNAV N97), and served as a member of the Chief of Naval Operations’ Strategic Studies Group XXVIII.