The Senate Armed Services Committee on Wednesday approved Charles Verdon of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to lead the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) defense programs office.
The committee approved Verdon’s nomination by a voice vote. The nuclear engineer, currently principal associate director at Livermore’s weapons and complex integration directorate, now needs approval from the full Senate to officially become NNSA deputy administrator for defense programs. Senate leadership had not scheduled a floor vote for Verdon at deadline Wednesday for Weapons Complex Morning Briefing.
President Donald Trump in February nominated Verdon to lead the NNSA portfolio of warhead life-extension and stockpile stewardship programs. Both House and Senate appropriators have proposed increasing the office’s yearly budget to roughly $11 billion in fiscal 2019 from about $10 billion in 2018: more or less what the White House requested. Senate appropriators proposed slightly less than their House counterparts.
In a May 7 nomination hearing, where committee leadership acknowledged Verdon’s fitness for the job, Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) warned the longtime Livermore hand that, if confirmed, he would suddenly find himself in charge of an “ill-conceived” plutonium-production strategy that “defies logic on all counts.”
Heinrich was referring to the NNSA’s plan to split production of plutonium pits, the fissile cores of nuclear warheds, between the Los Alamos National Laboratory in his state and a refitted facility at the Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C. Los Alamos would produce 30 pits a year by 2030, while Savannah River would produce another 50.
The Pentagon needs the NNSA to produce 80 pits a year beginning in 2030 to upgrade existing U.S. nuclear weapons as part of the 30-year, $1-trillion modernization-and-maintenance program the Barack Obama administration began in 2016.
NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty has said she will make the pit mission the top priority of the semiautonomous Department of Energy agency.
