NNSA ’22 Budget Details: SRS Pit Costs Balloon; W80 Alt for Sea-Launched Cruise Missile; B83 Sustainment Price Tag

June 1, 2021
By Exchange Monitor

Among the highlights of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s detailed fiscal year 2022 budget request: it will cost more than double what the agency once estimated to convert a plutonium recycling plant in South Carolina into a factory for nuclear-weapon triggers; planned air- and sea-launched cruise missiles will share a nuclear tip; next year’s costs to keep the B83 gravity bomb in warm storage are triple this years.

It was all part of the Joe Biden administration’s fiscal year 2022 National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) budget request of just under $20 billion. While about flat compared with the 2021 appropriation, the 2022 request seeks roughly 12% less for civilian nuclear weapons programs than the Donald Trump administration forecast would be necessary for the coming fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1.

First the big sticker shock: the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility (SRPPF) will cost around $11 billion to build, according to the detailed budget justification for the semi-autonomous DOE subagency released Friday, just ahead of the Memorial Day holiday. It also might take until 2035 to begin casting plutonium pits at Savannah River, the NNSA wrote in the request.

The cost and schedule figures for the South Carolina pit factory come from the project’s critical decision-1 (CD-1) review, conducted over the winter and submitted to NNSA headquarters in Washington in April. In a pre-CD-1 report, the NNSA thought it might cost $4.6 billion to convert the partially completed Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility in Savannah River Site’s F-Area into a pit plant.

Also in the budget request, the NNSA wrote that the nuclear warhead for a sea-launched cruise missile proposed by the Donald Trump administration, and so far supported by the Biden administration, will be a variant of the W80-4 warhead being prepared for the Pentagon’s next air-launched cruise missile, the Long Range Standoff Weapon.

Work on the sea-launched cruise missile program has to start in fiscal year 2022, NNSA said. A W80 alteration for the sea-based weapon will run on the same production line as the air-based weapon, similar to the way the agency handled a variant of the Navy’s smaller submarine-launched ballistic-missile warhead in 2019. That year, the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas, kept the line used for the W76-1 warhead refurbishment running to create a small, so-far-undisclosed, number of lower-yield W76-2 warheads.

The NNSA plans to produce its W80-4 first production unit, a proof-of-concept article intended to prove the design and manufacturing line is ready for mass production, in fiscal year 2025. The Air Force plans to deploy the Long Range Standoff Weapon around 2030.

Meanwhile, NNSA would spend nearly $98.5 million in fiscal year 2022 to start replacing limited life components in the B83 megaton-capable gravity bomb, if the Biden administration’s NNSA budget request becomes law. That is over three times higher than the 2021 appropriation of just under $31 million, which did not include a pair of planned B83 alterations mentioned in the 2022 request. This day of reckoning has been in the deck since the Trump administration, in its 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, decided to postpone the weapon’s retirement. 

The House Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee had not scheduled a hearing on the Biden administration’s NNSA budget request at deadline Tuesday for Weapons Complex Morning Briefing.