Pit Debate in 18-Month ‘Tactical Pause,’ House Armed Services Chair Says

September 1, 2021
By Exchange Monitor

Construction of plutonium pit factories should continue more or less as planned for another year-and-a-half, until the Joe Biden administration wraps up a nuclear posture review and the Savannah River Site delivers a baseline cost estimate for a pit factory there, the chair of the House Armed Services Committee said Tuesday. 

“We are sort of in a tactical pause of having to answer that question,” Smith said during a moderated, virtual question-and-answer session when asked whether he supported the planned plutonium pit factory the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is designing at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C. Decision time will be “18 months from now,” Smith said.

Before supporting the program, or not, Smith said he’ll want to see both the Biden administration’s nuclear posture review, due in January or so, and the baseline cost and schedule for the Savannah River Plutonium Production Facility (SRPPF). NNSA has said that estimate will be part of the project’s critical decision 2 milestone in fiscal year 2024, which begins Oct. 1, 2023 — about 25 months from now.

By then, “we’ll have gotten through President Biden’s nuclear posture review at that point, so we’ll have a better idea how many weapons we need,” Smith said.

Smith spoke to members of the public and the media during a webinar hosted by the Brookings Institute think tank in Washington. A Brookings moderator screened audience questions submitted before the event and put some of those questions to Smith, who appeared a day before the House Armed Services Committee was scheduled to mark up the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act. The bill would, if signed into law, authorize more than the requested funding for NNSA: $19.8 billion, up from $19.7 billion.

That authorization bill would approve all the money the civilian nuclear weapons agency sought for design and construction of pit factories, and procurement of pit-making equipment, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Savannah River Site. Authorization bills set policy and spending limits for appropriations bills that are written separately.

Existing military requirements, also codified in law, are for NNSA to make at least 10 pits annually by fiscal year 2024, at least 20 annually by 2025, at least 30 a year by 2026, and at least 80 annually by fiscal 2030. NNSA has said it will probably hit 30 a year in 2026, but not 80 a year until 2032 or 2035, depending on when the agency and its contractors can build SRPPF.

“If, in fact, we need more than 35 or 40 pits a year, then we are going to need a second facility,” Smith said on Tuesday’s webinar. “Los Alamos seems capable of doing 30. You can probably get it up to 40, but getting above that would be very difficult.”