President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed the fiscal 2018 National Defense Authorization Act, which would make it harder to move plutonium pit production out of New Mexico and authorizes Congress to keep funding a controversial plutonium conversion facility in South Carolina.
Trump signed the bill nearly a month after Congress sent the measure to his desk. The massive military policy legislation does not set agency budgets, but it does provide policy guidance and funding ceilings for congressional appropriations committees that do.
Overall, the bill authorizes more than $14 billion for the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) in fiscal 2018: about $1 billion more than the 2017 budget, and a little more even than the White House’s request.
On the policy side, the bill would require the NNSA to secure approval from the secretary of defense and NNSA administrator before manufacturing plutonium pits — the fissile cores of nuclear weapons — anywhere except a planned facility at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico expected to cost more than $3.5 billion.
The NNSA plans to produce between 50 and 80 plutonium pits a year by 2030 to refurbish U.S. nuclear warheads. While it has not yet announced plans to manufacture pits anywhere but Los Alamos, the agency is studying alternative production sites that could be cheaper.
The NDAA also authorizes:
- $340 million to construct the Mixed Oxide (MOX) Fuel Fabrication Facility at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C. That is $70 million more than the White House requested for the budget year that began on Oct. 1 to wind down construction. The MOX plant is designed to turn 34 metric tons of weapon-usable plutonium into commercial reactor fuel, but the NNSA is studying whether it could instead be used to produce plutonium pits.
- $98 million that the Trump administration requested to start building a new office building for some 1,200 NNSA employees in Albuquerque, N.M.
- $58 million to research and develop capabilities that could allow the U.S. to field a new ground-launched cruise missile in the range prohibited by the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty: a major nuclear-arms pact the U.S. says Russia has violated by testing and deploying a short-range cruise missile.
- About $30 million for the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board. Earlier this year, board Chairman Sean Sullivan privately proposed that the White House ask Congress to eliminate this independent nuclear health-and-safety watchdog.
Congress has yet to pass a permanent 2018 appropriations bill, so all government agencies are still funded at 2017 levels under stopgap budget bills. The latest temporary funding expires Dec. 22, before which time Congress will either have to pass a permanent 2018 budget, or another continuing resolution.
