The Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons budget would get a small bump for fiscal year 2023 while its nuclear waste budgets would fall a little year-over-year, under a White House budget proposal released Monday.
The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) would receive about $21.5 billion for fiscal year 2023, some $750 million more than the 2022 appropriation approved in early March as part of an omnibus federal spending bill. The Weapons Activities line, with NNSA’s bread-and-butter warhead, bomb and infrastructure modernizaiton programs, would get the biggest increase:
Meanwhile, the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management would see its budget for cleanup of shuttered weapons production sites fall slightly to $7.6 billion under the Joe Biden administration’s budget request for fiscal 2023, down from almost $7.9 billion appropriated for fiscal 2022.
Within the total, Defense Environmental Cleanup would end up with about $6.5 billion bill, down from $6.7 billion in fiscal 2022. That’s after accounting for $417 million that the White House wants Congress to appropriate within Defense Environmental cleanup to cover shortfalls in the Uranium Enrichment Decontamination & Decommissioning Fund (UED&D) that pays for remediation of shuttered gaseous diffusion plants. Defense Environmental Cleanup is the largest tranche of funding for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management.
Including the proposed transfer from Defense Environmental, UED&D would in the Biden budget get $822 million for the fiscal year starting Oct. 1, down slightly from the $841 million for the year ended Sept. 30. The fund is for cleanup at the former uranium enrichment sites in Oak Ridge, Tenn., Paducah, Ky., and Piketon, Ohio, home of the Portsmouth Site.
For DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy, which handles the government’s strategy for civilian nuclear waste disposal, the White House proposed a budget that was about flat compared with the 2022 appropriation at roughly $1.67 billion.
The nuclear energy office’s budget proposal for fiscal year 2023 also includes bailout credits for financially struggling nuclear power plants, part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act signed into law in November. The infrastructure bill provided $6 billion credits over five years, to be split into $1.2 billion increments annually from 2022 to 2026.
Over at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the regulator for civilian power plants, the White House proposed a fiscal 2023 budget of around $929 million, according to a budget summary published Monday. That’s roughly 6%, or some $41.5 million, more than the 2022 budget of about $827 million. Less the $792 million in fees NRC expects to recoup in license fees for 2023, that would come out to an appropriation of about $137 million.
The Department of Energy had yet to release its detailed budget justification documents as of Monday afternoon, but according to budget details released by the Pentagon, the White House has not requested any money for a nuclear-tipped sea-launched cruise missile that was supposed to be based on the W80-4 warhead the NNSA is developing at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for the Air Force’s planned Long Range standoff weapon cruise missile.
