Top end of pit-plant acquisition north of $35B, NNSA administrator says

April 26, 2024
By Exchange Monitor

It could cost up to $37 billion to acquire the pair of plutonium pit production facilities needed to produce new nuclear weapon cores for the rest of this century, the head of the National Nuclear Security Administration said at a conference last week.

The range, provided by Administrator Jill Hruby at the annual Strategic Weapons in the 21st Century Symposium, is $28 billion to $37 billion, according toHruby’s prepared remarks. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Los Alamos National Laboratory host the annual symposium, usually in Washington.

The Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility, the larger of the two planned pit plants, could cost between $18 billion and $25 billion, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) estimated in its fiscal year 2025 budget request, released in March.

Hruby testified in Congress last week that the Savannah River facility will come online in the middle of the 2030s and initially make cores for the Navy’s planned W93 submarine-based intercontinental ballistic missile warhead.

The smaller of the two pit factories, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s PF-4 Plutonium Facility, will by December begin producing warheads for the Air Force’s W87-1 land-based intercontinental ballistic missile warhead.