NNSA seeks $1B boost for fiscal year 2025; Savannah River pit estimate soars

March 15, 2024

By Dan Leone

The White House this week requested about $25 billion for the National Nuclear Security Administration, more than $860 million, or 3.6%, above the 2024 appropriation signed into law late last week.

The agency also said in the budget request that the cost of a planned South Carolina facility to make the nuclear-weapon first-stage cores called pits was much higher, perhaps more than twice as high, as the nuclear-weapons steward estimated only a year ago.

Almost all of the proposed increase for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) in 2025 would go to the agency’s Weapons Activities account, which funds bread-and-butter nuclear modernization and maintenance programs. Weapons Activities would get about $19.9 billion if the request became law, which is some $740-million or 3.9% more than the 2024 appropriation.

NNSA’s Office of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation would get about a 4.5% cut of $115 million or so, under the white House request. That would leave the account with roughly $2.5 million to keep weaponizable nuclear and radioactive material away from bad actors and monitor Russian-occupied power plants in Ukraine, which Russia again invaded in 2022.

NNSA Naval Reactors, responsible for design, maintenance and delivery of nuclear reactor components and fuel for nuclear-powered Navy warships and submarines, would receive a roughly 9% raise under the request to $2.1 billion or so, about $170 million above the 2024 appropriation.

Pits

Although NNSA hedged about the fidelity of the estimate, the agency said in its latest budget request that the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility, the larger of two planned factories for making plutonium pits, could cost up to $25 billion to build by September 2035.

The more optimistic end of the NNSA’s estimate for the Savannah River pit plant was $18 billion to finish by October 2032, according to the 2025 budget request.

Either figure is a big jump from the estimate of $12 billion or so that the NNSA provided a year ago in its annual budget request.

The Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility’s “design has not progressed far enough to update the project cost estimate,” NNSA wrote in the latest budget request.

Overall, NNSA’s Primary Capability Modernization account, which that funds pit plants at Savannah River and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, would stay about flat compared with the 2024 appropriation as the agency shifts funding toward the unbuilt Savannah River Plutonium Production Facility from the Los Alamos’ PF-4 Plutonium Facility.

Primary Capability Modernization would get roughly $5.9 billion for 2025 under the request, about $12 million more than the 2024 appropriation. 

Within the total, Los Alamos Plutonium Modernization would fall to about $1.5 billion from almost $1.8 billion in fiscal year 2024 while Savannah River Plutonium Modernization would rise about 20%, or more than $210 million, to almost $1.3 billion from about $1 billion in 2024.

Los Alamos officials have said the lab might begin making the first type of new pits, for W87-1 warheads, by the end of this year and hit the throughput milestone of 30 annually by 2028. 

W87-1 will be a newly manufactured replacement for the W78, including a freshly cast pit. The warheads will eventually tip the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missiles scheduled to enter service in 2030 or so, but initially with W87-0 warheads: a modified version of the other warhead used in the current Minuteman III fleet.

SLCM-N

The 2025 budget request has no line-item request for a sea-capable W80-4 cruise missile variant to tip a planned Sea Launched Nuclear Cruise Missile known as SLCM-N. 

However, the NNSA said it does plan to fund the work, as Congress required it to do, most recently in the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act.

The agency declined to say how or to what effect it would obey Congress’ direction, writing only in the 2025 budget request that it seeks some $1.2 billion for the air launched W80-4 and that by using those funds, NNSA “will work with the Navy to execute in a manner that provides the most deterrence value for the least risk to the modernization program, the production enterprise, and the military.”

Uranium Processing Facility

The NNSA still has not rebaselined the Uranium Processing Facility, which will be the next-generation hub for manufacturing nuclear weapon secondary stages at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., according to the budget request. 

In the request, the agency said the Uranium Processing Facility might notionally be complete by September 2030 and cost as much as $9.3 billion or so. NNSA also said these figure could change when the project is finally rebaselined. A year ago, with the same caveats, NNSA thought the date for Critical Decision-4, the end of construction, might happen as early as 2028 and cost up to $8.95 billion.

For 2025, NNSA requested $800 million for the Uranium Processing Facility, down about $10 million compared with the 2024 appropriation.