Publications: Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor

The Department of the Air Force’s $217.5 billion fiscal 2025 budget includes $3.7 billion for the planned LGM-35A Sentinel ICBM as the department looks for cost savings and faces possible delays to address a Nunn-McCurdy breach.Such breaches occur when programs exceed 25% program acquisition unit cost growth.In January, the Air Force informed Congress of a […]

Rep. Bill Foster (D-Ill.) led 24 Democrats who introduced a bill Wednesday that supports the continued value of arms control and condemns Russia for suspending the bilateral New START nuclear arms control treaty between Moscow and Washington. The bill, which was referred to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, calls for the administration of President Joe […]

PHOENIX — The Savannah River Site could send as many as 40 shipments of diluted surplus plutonium to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in 2024, a manager at the Savannah River Site said here. Or maybe half that many, Lee Sims, K Area Facility Manager at Savannah River for the site’s Fluor-led prime contractor, Savannah […]

PHOENIX — The Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina is about 20% to its goal of adding 600 electric vehicles over the next few years, an executive with the site’s prime contractor said here Tuesday. The site currently has 116 electric vehicles and will add another 44 this year, Mike Swain, executive […]

Leaders of a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee said Tuesday they are working on dueling bills to sanction either all, or parts, of Russia’s state-owned nuclear-energy corporation. “I am in the process of drafting a tough sanctions bill that would mandate the administration decouple the U.S. and our allies from Rosatom,” Rep. Tom Kean (R-N.J.) said […]

The Senate on Thursday passed a bill that would extend and expand the federal legislation that financially compensates people harmed by radioactive material used to build the U.S. nuclear arsenal. The measure passed 69-30 with one senator not voting. President Joe Biden (D) on Tuesday said he would sign the bill. “The President believes we have […]

Jill Hruby, administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), spoke this week at the Second International Symposium on Insider Threat Mitigation in Brussels, which the nuclear-weapons agency co-hosted with the Belgian Federal Agency for Nuclear Control. The NNSA posted Hruby’s prepared remarks online.   During the International Atomic Energy Agency’s board of governors’ meeting […]

The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board continues without a quorum for its role as federal safety watchdog for Department of Energy nuclear weapons facilities, and the current chair’s term expires this fall. Designed as a five-person panel, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) still has only two members. A Senate committee has approved a White House […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration wants to hear from entities interested in building a massive, 2,000-acre clean-energy farm to help power the Nevada National Security Site outside Las Vegas. In an 18-page request for qualifications published Friday, the NNSA said it will choose one or more companies to develop and construct a facility capable of […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration stands to see its roughly $24 billion budget request fulfilled under the compromise funding agreement reached by Congress this week.   The House approved the bill on Wednesday by a vote of 339 to 85, the Senate was still debating the measure at deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor, […]

The NNSA intends to grant SHINE Technologies cost-share funding to build and operate a new facility for producing the medical isotope molybdenum-99 (Mo-99) without the use of highly-enriched uranium, according to a March 4 filing in the Federal Register. The agency filed an unpublished version of the decision last week. SHINE received a construction permit for […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration stands to see its roughly $24 billion budget request fulfilled under the compromise funding agreement reached by Congress this week.   The bill includes just over $19 billion for NNSA weapons activities and includes a requirement that the agency work with the scientific advisory group JASON to “conduct an assessment of […]

This week, almost halfway through the fiscal year that started Oct. 1, congressional appropriators announced they would pass a final 2024 budget for the Department of Energy and other agencies next week. In the meantime, to avoid a partial government shutdown on Friday, when funding for DOE and other agencies was set to expire, Congress […]

Russian President Vladimir Putin is again threatening the use of nuclear weapons – this time overtly – after suggestions from European leaders that Western troops could be deployed to Ukraine in non-combat roles.  During his annual State of the Nation address to the country’s Federal Assembly on Thursday, Putin warned NATO countries that Russia would […]

U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) this week implored fellow lawmakers to renew a program to compensate victims of Manhattan Project-era radiation exposure.  In a letter dated Feb. 26, Hawley asked his Senate colleagues to reauthorize the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA), which he said is “critical funding,” without which citizens exposed to radioactive materials during […]

Nuclear Naval reactor maker BWX Technologies is out of the submarine missile tube building business after completing its contracted work for the U.S. Navy and allied fleets in 2023, the company’s chief executive said on Feb. 27.  BWXT makes Common Missile Compartment tubes at its factory in Mount Vernon, Ind. The tubes are designed to […]

Congressional delay in funding legacy cleanup from nuclear weapons tests in the Marshall Islands — covered in a recent Government Accountability Office report —hurts relations between the United States and the strategically-located Pacific nation, the president of the Marshall Islands told a U.K. newspaper this week. U.S. lawmakers are dragging their feet in funding a […]

Michelle Sandoval, an employee at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, is again vying to represent New Mexico’s 57th district in the statehouse.  Sandoval, who unsuccessfully ran for the State House seat in 2022, announced another bid for the office as a Democrat on her Facebook page and in the Rio Rancho Observer. Three years ago, […]

Earnings rose at BWX Technologies, Lynchburg, Va., for 2023, which the maker of nuclear naval reactors and manager of nuclear weapons sites attributed Tuesday mostly to favorable adjustments on government contracts. For the year, net earnings were $246.3 million, or $2.68 per share, up about 7.7% from $238.6 million, or $2.60 a share in 2023. […]

All shifts were scheduled to report normally to the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas, again on Friday, even as nearby wildfires of historic intensity continued to burn.  The plant’s website shows normal scheduling for the day, swing and graveyard shifts on Friday. Workers were recalled Wednesday after operations at the National […]

Excluding equipment and construction, the National Nuclear Security Administration will spend about $1 billion over 10 years to study the effects of aging on nuclear-weapon cores, the Government Accountability Office reported this week. According to the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) unclassified review of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) classified “Research Program Plan for Plutonium […]

The leader of U.S. Strategic Command now counts a nuclear-tipped sea-launched cruise missile among his “critical” nuclear modernization efforts, alongside a new stealth bomber, ballistic missile submarines and intercontinental ballistic missiles.  Air Force Gen. Anthony Cotton has, until Thursday, avoided specifically endorsing development of a nuclear-capable sea-launched cruise missile, or SLCM-N. He has said that […]

A high-ranking Japanese member of the Yakuza international organized crime syndicate allegedly planned to traffic materials containing uranium and weapons grade plutonium from Burma to other countries, including Iran, the Department of Justice wrote this week in a press release describing an indictment against Takeshi Ebisawa in the U.S. Southern District of New York. “As […]

Several recent tests of the Air Force’s land-based, LGM-35A Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile at Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, Calif., reflect “significant progress” in the weapon’s engineering, manufacturing and development phase, missile prime Northrop Grumman said Tuesday. “Forward and aft sections of a Sentinel ICBM [intercontinental ballistic missile ] missile were evaluated through a […]

A small bipartisan group in the House released a foreign aid bill with new border security policies and war aid for Ukraine, but no stimulus funds for domestic uranium enrichment. The roughly $66-billion bill filed Feb. 15 by Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) is a counterproposal to the roughly $95-billion foreign aid bill the Senate passed, […]

Fluor Chairman and CEO David Constable expects the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration to decide on a new management contractor for the Pantex Plant in Texas in the second or third quarter of this calendar year. Constable made the comment during a Tuesday earnings call with Wall Street analysts. The Fluor chief is […]

A private equity firm that acquired and merged several businesses that work for the Department of Energy sold the rolled-up companies to Cadre Holdings, a Jacksonville, Fla., maker of law-enforcement equipment. Cadre bought Alpha Safety Group, created by Benford Capital Partners of Chicago in 2021 from the former Nuclear Filter Technologies, for a little more […]