NNSA, Pentagon ‘sorting out’ pit needs; new pits are ‘a hedge,’ NNSA administrator says

April 29, 2022

By Dan Leone

The Pentagon and the National Nuclear Security Administration are still “sorting out” exactly how many nuclear-weapon triggers the military needs and by when, the head of the civilian agency said in congressional testimony this week.

Law requires the semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear-weapons agency to make 80 pits a year by 2030 — a goal the agency last year acknowledged it would miss by at least two to five years.

“Is 80 the magic number?” Sen. Angus King (D-Maine) asked senior National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) officials during a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s strategic forces subcommittee, which he chairs. “Is 80 the number we project we’ll need?”

“That’s a good question,” Jill Hruby, administrator of the NNSA, told King. “So we’re working really closely now with the Department of Defense, NNSA and the Department of Defense, to look at the outyear requirements and to see how we can satisfy the program of record in ways that we’re all comfortable with that mean a safe, secure, reliable and effective weapon program.”

The NNSA still plans to build a pair of plutonium pit plants to furnish the arsenal for much of the rest of this century, during which existing pits — which according to public estimates have a lifetime of 75 years to 80 years, if not longer — will become too old to reliably trigger explosions of the intended destructive power.

The NNSA expects to begin making about 30 pits annually at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 2026 or so. A companion pit plant, to be built at the Savannah River Site from the partially completed Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility plutonium recycling plant, will not come online until 2032 or 2035, the NNSA told Congress in June.

The Pentagon, and the NNSA, had previously framed the need for 80 pits a year as a hard requirement for completing the ongoing modernization of the U.S. nuclear arsenal inside of the 30-year window that opened in 2016 during the Barack Obama administration. Congress has since codified the deadline in law.

In Wednesday’s hearing, Hruby told lawmakers that, despite the challenges with the Savannah planned River Plutonium Processing Facility, none of the pits in the arsenal are close to aging out. If need be, Hruby said, the NNSA could use existing pits to complete future nuclear-weapon life-extensions — though that would mean shorter stints for weapons in the field, compared with using new pits.

“[W]e are establishing pit production as a hedge against plutonium aging and pit aging,” said Hruby in an unprompted address to King. “[O]ur pits are not today at any kind of an aging cliff so we can reuse pits, we just don’t like that plan because we may have to take them out [of other nuclear weapons] before the end of the life of the weapon system.”

NNSA request mirrors unpublished nuclear posture review, energy secretary says

Meanwhile, the Secretary of Energy testified Thursday in the House that the NNSA’s 2023 budget request includes everything permitted by the Joe Biden administration’s as-yet unpublished nuclear posture review.

The nuclear-weapons steward’s 2023 request of $21.4 billion is around 3.5% higher than the 2022 appropriation, about 1.5% higher than what the Donald Trump administration predicted the agency would need for the coming year, and includes almost everything that the Trump administration called for its own nuclear posture review.

The request “is fully informed by the 2022 Nuclear Posture Review,” Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said in written testimony prepared for the House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee. Granholm testified before appropriators on Thursday at 2:30 p.m., a few hours after appearing before the House Energy and Commerce energy subcommittee.

The White House has circulated a classified version of the nuclear posture review on Capitol Hill and released a one-page summary of the document publicly, but the administration had not as of Wednesday afternoon published the full, unclassified review.

But Granholm’s testimony, and the NNSA’s detailed budget request for its weapons programs, reveal a number of things about the review, including that the Biden administration is sticking by the agency’s plan to forge ahead with both the Los Alamos Plutonium Pit Production Project and the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility.

At $4.6 billion, NNSA’s 2023 budget request for modernization of its plutonium-pit infrastructure is higher than the 2022 appropriation by some 60% [sic], or $1.7 billion. It is also much higher than the Donald Trump administration predicted in 2020 that NNSA would need for pits during the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1. [that is true.]

The NNSA budget request also shows that the Biden nuclear posture review includes explicit cuts to few weapons programs, with the planned sea-launched, nuclear-tipped cruise missile, or SLCM-N, and the B83 gravity bomb bearing the brunt.