The Department of Energy’s plutonium-pit production plant in South Carolina would get a little extra scrutiny, and civilian nuclear weapons programs would receive a little more funding than requested, under the major defense policy bill approved unanimously late Wednesday by the House Armed Services Committee.
At about 15 minute before midnight, the committee approved its version of the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal 2021 with 56 votes.
Like a companion bill approved by the Senate Armed Services Committee in June, the House panel’s measure would authorize the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to spend about $20 billion in the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1 — greater than a 20% increase from the current appropriations of $16.7 billion. In contrast with the White House request and Senate version of the bill, the House NDAA authorizes some $2.1 billion for NNSA nonproliferation programs, instead of about $2 billion.
The House had not scheduled floor debate for its version of the NDAA at deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he expects the full upper chamber to approve its version of the annual military policy bill after the chamber’s two-week Independence Day recess. Both encompass roughly $740 billion in defense authorizations, primarily for the Pentagon.
Appropriators in both chambers have not yet released legislation that would provide the funding authorized under the NDAA. The House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee is scheduled July 7 to mark up its annual spending bill, which covers the Energy Department and its semiautonomous NNSA. Subcommittee Chairwoman Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) has already said she will not approve the NNSA’s requested budget. The full committee is scheduled to take up the energy and water bill on July 10.
The Armed Services Committee shared Kaptur’s sentiment last year, when it proposed less funding for intercontinental ballistic missile procurement and warhead-core production. The House ultimately gave up on those proposals in negotiating the final 2020 bill with the Senate. This time, House Armed Services Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.) made no serious attempt to deviate from the NNSA’s funding request.
An amendment calling for a DOE-level cost review of the planned Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility, sponsored by Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee Chairman Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.), was the only controversial amendment about nuclear weapons programs that got through Wednesday’s 14-hour debate — 31 to 25, on a straight party line.
Other nuke amendments went down in flames.
One, from Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.) was a retread of an amendment that also fared poorly in committee last year. It called for a study on extending the current generation of nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles, but was shouted down by voice vote.
Another amendment, offered remotely under new House rules by the progressive Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), fell by a wide bipartisan majority, 12 to 44. Khanna wanted to remove authorization for $1 billion in funding sought this year by the Air Force to start buying new intercontinental ballistic missiles, and instead authorize $1 billion for a Pentagon pandemic preparedness account.
Smith voted for all these amendments and remains receptive to trimming the U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile fleet, but he said he would not fight any big battles about any nuclear weapons programs this election year.
“I’ve disagreed with it, but I’m putting all of that aside for the moment,” the committee chairman said during the markup. “We had that debate last year. It came out the way it came out. It’s not going to change this year.”
That left nuclear skeptics in the committee with only Cooper’s amendment, which if approved by the full House and left intact after a conference with the ardently pro-nuclear Senate would require the Department of Energy to conduct an independent cost estimate of the planned Savannah River Site Plutonium Processing Facility: the larger of two pit factories the NNSA is building to produce 80 fissile warhead cores a year by 2030.
When the estimate for the Savannah River plant is done, the secretary of energy — who may not delegate the task — would have to either certify that she or he is 90% confident in the estimate, or come up with a new plan for building the planned pit factory.
Cooper’s amendment reserved the job of certifying DOE’s confidence in the Savannah River pit-facility to the secretary of energy alone. It follows last winter’s internal departmental budget debate, in which NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty’s request that the White House seek roughly $20 billion for the weapons agency prevailed over Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette’s preference for $17.5 billion for NNSA.
The NNSA plans to build the Plutonium Processing Facility by converting a canceled plutonium recycling plant at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., for a new nuclear weapons mission — making the cores of warheads for the next generation of silo-based intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Both the House and Senate Armed Services NDAAs include the roughly $440 million requested for the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility in 2021, up from some $410 million this year.
In February, at the ExchangeMonitor’s annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit, contractor Savannah River Nuclear Solutions said it would have documents for the facility’s Critical Decision 1 (CD-1) review ready by the end of June. An NNSA spokesperson said Thursday the contractor was “on track to deliver the CD-1 package by the end of December 2020.” In NNSA project management, CD-1 is the milestone in which the agency formalizes its preferred means of meeting a mission, and roughs out a cost estimate that is formalized in the subsequent CD-2 milestone. the NNSA has given itself until March 30, 2021 to finish the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility’s CD-1 review, according to the agency’s 2021 budget request.
Meanwhile, both bills also would authorize more than $835 million for pits at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the NNSA is upgrading the existing Plutonium Facility to be the companion production site to the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility. That would be nearly $530 million more than the 2020 appropriation.
The NNSA wants both the South Carolina facility and the upgraded Los Alamos operation to combine to produce 80 pits annually by 2030. Los Alamos would start up first, casting 10 pits in 2024, then ramping up to 30 pits annually by 2026. The Savannah River plant would start casting pits in 2030, at 50 a year. The NNSA says each plant could make 80 a year alone by 2030, under current projects, but studies funded by the agency have raised alarms about whether that is really possible on such a short timeline.
Both facilities will initially make pits for W87-1 warheads, the planned tips of the silo-based Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent missiles that the Air Force wants, by 2030 or so, to replace the existing Minuteman III fleet on a one-for-one basis. The NNSA has said the first GBSD missiles might use existing warheads deployed on Minuteman III missiles.
The entire planned pit complex would cost some $30 billion to build and operate over a life cycle of roughly 50 years, the NNSA estimates.
