The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) would get the $65 million it seeks in fiscal 2019 for a low-yield nuclear warhead, but nothing for a new warhead-core factory in South Carolina, under a budget bill approved this week by the House Appropriations Committee.
The bill, voted to the floor Wednesday 29-20 along party lines, also would steer the NNSA away from designing an interoperable nuclear warhead that in the future could fly on both Air Force and Navy missiles. Instead, the legislation directs the NNSA to look into options for extending the life of the W78 warhead that now tips the Air Force’s intercontinental ballistic missiles, and which the interoperable warhead proposed by the Barack Obama administration would have replaced.
Overall, the NNSA would receive more than $15 billion for 2019: 4.5 percent more than in 2018 and 1.5 percent more than the White House sought for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1.
The House committee’s NNSA budget bill was not scheduled for a vote on the floor at deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor. The Senate Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee is set to mark up its version of the NNSA’s 2019 budget Tuesday. The text of the measure was not published at deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor.
The House committee’s bill would provide $65 million for the NNSA to modify some existing W76 submarine-launched ballistic missile warheads beginning in 2019. Rep Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) offered and withdrew an amendment that would have defunded the low-yield warhead and spent the $65 million on NNSA nonproliferation programs in 2019.
The Donald Trump administration called for a low-yield warhead as part of the Nuclear Posture Review published in February. The NNSA requested funding for the warhead last month within a series of modifications to the budget plan it delivered to Capitol Hill in March. As a result, the House Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee, which writes the the agency’s budget bill every year, never held a hearing about the weapon.
During Wednesday’s markup, subcommittee Chairman Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) said that would change.
“Our subcommittee will be holding hearings on this,” Simpson said, telling the dais he shared some of the concerns that led his colleague, Lee, to propose an amendment to defund the low-yield warhead. He did not say when the subcommittee might hold this hearing, and it was not scheduled at deadline Friday.
The full committee did adopt a noncontroversial amendment that would require the NNSA to write a report describing the cost and schedule of the low-yield modification, and how the modification might affect the agency’s other four warhead life-extension programs. The report would be due 30 days after the bill becomes law.
Meanwhile, the House NNSA budget as written would not fund the two-pronged pit-production strategy the agency announced last week, under which operations would be split between the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
The strategy involves converting the unfinished Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) at Savannah River into a factory capable of producing 50 of these fissile nuclear-warhead cores a year by 2030. Los Alamos would supply another 30 pits annually by that year, under the current plan. The Pentagon wants DOE to make at least 80 pits per year in 2030 and beyond.
The House committee’s bill would provide $300 million to reconfigure and add new equipment, such as glove boxes, to existing Los Alamos plutonium facilities in 2019. That is almost $45 million more than requested. However, the bill would provide no funding to begin what the NNSA estimates will be a $4.6-billion project to convert the MFFF into a pit plant.
The House legislation also would provide no funding for dilute-and-dispose: the proposed replacement for the MFFF’s nonproliferation mission to eliminate of 34 metric tons of nuclear weapon-usable plutonium. Instead, the bill would provide $335 million for continued construction of the plant at Savannah River.
Dilute-and-dispose would involve chemically weakening the plutonium at proposed Savannah River Site facilities, mixing the material with concrete-like grout, then burying the resulting mixture at the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.
The NNSA announced the two-pronged pit approach last week, the same day Energy Secretary Rick Perry exercised the authority Congress gave him to cancel the current MFFF mission.
Last year, Congress said Perry could cancel the MOX project if he certified that an alternative plutonium-disposal method is less than half as expensive as completing the MFFF. On May 10, Perry told the House and Senate Armed Services committees that dilute-and-dispose would cost $20 billion, while finishing the MFFF and processing plutonium there would cost almost $50 billion.
The 2018 omnibus budget signed in March forbids the NNSA from halting construction at the MOX plant until 30 days after Perry’s decision to cancel the plant. However, the agency has apparently tapped the brakes at the site already.
On Wednesday, after House appropriators approved funding MFFF for another year, the local Aiken Standard reported that the NNSA had frozen hiring and procurement at MFFF prime contractor CB&I AREVA MOX Services. The freeze went into effect Monday and could last up to 90 days, the newspaper reported.
