The Department of Energy’s plan for plutonium pit manufacturing will be made clearer in the Donald Trump administration’s 2019 budget request in February, agency officials told members of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board last week.
That is according to a presentation uploaded to the board’s website Jan. 19 after a briefing with Department of Energy and National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) officials including Phil Calbos: the agency’s principal assistant deputy administrator for defense programs.
Bloomberg and Politico both reported this week that the 2019 budget would be rolled out on Feb. 12.
Last year, in a nine-page summary of a much larger study, it leaked out to the press that the NNSA thought it could annually produce 80 plutonium nuclear-weapon cores, or “pits,” by moving production to South Carolina from New Mexico. A similar summary appeared on the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board’s website Friday.
According to those slides, the NNSA will provide “cost/schedule estimates by early February to support FY19 President’s Budget Request Rollout.” Those estimates will be informed in part by an engineering analysis conducted for the NNSA’s Office of Acquisition and Project Management by Parsons Government Services under an enterprise construction management services contract awarded in 2017.
The president’s budget request is the White House detailed spending plan for the government fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. The administration is legally required to publish the request by the first Monday of February, but presidents of both parties routinely blow the deadline.
The White House Office of Management and Budget, which quarterbacks the administration’s budget request every year, did not reply to multiple requests for comment this week.
The NNSA thinks it might cost between $1.4 billion and $5.4 billion to get pit production up and running at the Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C., by 2031. Keeping pit production at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, on the other hand, would cost $1.9 billion to $7.5 billion, and production might not come online until 2033, according to the Jan. 19 briefing.
Meanwhile, several local governments in South Carolina have passed resolutions welcoming the NNSA’s pit mission. These localities say they want the work in addition to, not instead of, the massive plutonium disposition mission to be handled by the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility being built at Savannah River.
However, according to the NNSA study briefed to the defense board last week, a cheaper plutonium mission is contingent on converting the still-under-construction Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility for pit duty. Both the Obama and Trump administrations have sought to kill the project in favor of an alternative plutonium disposal method, but have failed to persuade Congress
South Carolina’s congressional delegation has yet to stake out a public position about bringing the plutonium-pit mission to the Savannah River Site. The offices of Sens. Lindsey Graham (R) and Tim Scott (R) did not respond to a request for comment this week, nor did the office of Rep. Joe Wilson (R), whose district includes the Savannah River Site. Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor has sent multiple requests for comment by email to these lawmakers since the NNSA pit study leaked, none of which were answered.
On the other hand, New Mexico’s congressional delegation loudly opposes moving the pit mission away from Los Alamos. Lawmakers from the Land of Enchantment claim the NNSA’s pit study is full of bad and faulty assumptions deliberately skewed to make Los Alamos look bad.
