A Republican bid to add the better part of $4 billion for construction of plutonium pit factories to the National Nuclear Security Administration’s budget failed in the Senate on Sunday.
The funding was proposed as an amendment to the bipartisan infrastructure bill that at deadline Monday appeared headed for a final vote in the Senate this week.
The amendment, sponsored by Sens. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) and Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), would have provided a total of $3.85 billion from fiscal year 2022 through 2026 for construction of plutonium pit plants at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Savannah River Site — $770 million a year, on average.
Shelby tried to get unanimous consent for the amendment, which contained a total of $50 billion for defense infrastructure spending, but the motion was blocked by another Senator on Sunday evening. The Senate then voted 68-29 to invoke cloture on the infrastructure bill itself: a procedural motion that limits further debate on the measure, making a floor vote without the amendment inevitable.
A 2022 spending bill passed by the House in July and a companion bill pending in the Senate since last week both provide roughly the $1.7 billion requested for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) proposed two-state plutonium pit complex.
The House’s 2022 appropriations package has about $20 billion for the NNSA in 2022, as requested. The Senate Appropriations Committee has approved roughly the same top line for the semi-autonomous civilian nuclear-weapons agency.
Although the NNSA has conceded that, as things stand, the proposed Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility (SRPPF) in Aiken, S.C., probably will not be ready to make 50 pits annually by 2030 as planned, the agency said it can probably still begin producing 30 pits a year at Los Alamos’ PF-4 Plutonium Facility, which the NNSA is expanding for the mission, by 2026.
Pits are the fissile cores of nuclear-weapon primary stages.
