Los Alamos National Laboratory

Though we won’t know for sure until the fiscal year 2013 budget is released on February 13, reports suggest that the Obama administration has decided to delay construction of Los Alamos National Laboratory’s multi-billion dollar facility, the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Nuclear Facility (CMRR-NF). I recently wrote a piece on this topic titled, "The Case Against Increasing Plutonium Pit Production Capacity."

The key findings are:

1. While the CMRR-NF will be used for a range of activities, it can also be used to support an increase plutonium pit production capacity.

2. The Obama administration Nuclear Posture Review endorsed the Bush administration’s concept of a responsive infrastructure, restating that new nuclear warhead production facilities will serve as a “hedge against technical or geopolitical surprise.”

3. By the time of its scheduled completion date of 2024, most nuclear weapons in the arsenal will have already been refurbished or in the middle of a refurbishment.

4. Increased capacity would inhibit opportunities for increasing security by altering perceptions about the U.S. commitment to reductions or disarmament.

5.  Given the potential risks involved, the current budget environment presents an opportunity for Congress to reevaluate whether it is necessary to move ahead with this facility.

You can read the entire piece here.

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Nuclear Weapons Complex, budget, Life Extension Program, NNSA, Nukes on a Blog (all tags)

by Nickolas Roth and Ulrika Grufman

This week, Massachusetts Representative Edward Markey held a press conference announcing that more than sixty Members of Congress had co-signed his letter to the super committee urging them to substantially cut nuclear weapons funding in order to balance the budget.

In reply, Ohio Representative Michael Turner, Chairman of the House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee, offered some of his usual rhetoric that cutting funding meant the U.S. was unilaterally disarming. His statement was quickly followed by the release of a letter sent to the Senate Appropriations Committee signed by Republican members of the House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee asking that the Senate fully fund the President’s request for nuclear weapons. To justify the request for more money, the letter makes a number of questionable arguments regarding the nuclear weapons budgeting process over the past year.

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Nukes on a Blog, National Nuclear Security Administration, Nuclear Weapons Complex, Congress, Budget (all tags)

In case you missed part 4 of the UCS/FAS analysis of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Stockpile Stewardship Program for fiscal year 2012, we looked at the relationship between planned nuclear weapons complex and stockpile modernization and stockpile reductions.

We find that “the use of new warhead production facilities to produce additional hedge warheads undermines the administration’s message that the new facilities are needed to allow a reduction of the stockpile. It suggests that even with a new “responsive” warhead production complex, the future stockpile will still include a sizeable hedge of reserve warheads.”

You can read the entire post on the FAS blog or on the UCS blog.

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Nukes on a Blog, National Nuclear Security Administration, Nuclear Weapons Complex, Congress, Budget (all tags)

Part three of the UCS/FAS analysis of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Stockpile Stewardship Program for fiscal year 2012, titled "Hydrodynamic Tests: Not to Scale," sheds light on scaled experiments, which are a relatively unknown form of subcritical nuclear testing.  

We find that “the push for scaled experiments is coming from NNSA officials, not the nuclear weapons laboratories. The labs have resisted because they are overburdened by the increasingly ambitious Life Extension Programs. NNSA officials claim that scaled experiments could yield ten times more data points and save money because one large scaled experiment could replace twenty of the smaller hydrodynamic experiments conducted today. Lab scientists maintain that scaled experiments would require major new equipment investments that are not currently planned.”

As you might recall, the Senate Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee recently addressed the issue of scaled experiments in its committee report. You can read my summary of its findings here.

You can read all of post #3 on the FAS blog or on the UCS blog.

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Nukes on a Blog, National Nuclear Security Administration, Nuclear Weapons Complex, Congress, Budget (all tags)

Yesterday, I wrote about the four part joint UCS/FAS project analyzing the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) Stockpile Stewardship Program for fiscal year 2012. Today’s post is about NNSA’s plan for modernizing the nuclear weapons stockpile through Life Extension Programs (LEPs). We find that “NNSA’s enthusiasm for extensively modifying all warheads may be going beyond what Congress and the Obama administration as a whole will support. The foundation for such objections is clearly laid out in the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review, which states explicitly that the United States ‘will study options for ensuring the safety, security, and reliability of nuclear warheads on a case-by-case basis.’ (p. xiv). This seems to contradict NNSA’s pursuit of every available surety feature for every warhead.”

You can read the entire post on the FAS blog or on the UCS blog.

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Nukes on a Blog, National Nuclear Security Administration, Nuclear Weapons Complex, Congress, Budget (all tags)

Every year, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) releases its Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan (SSMP), which is an outline of its near- and long-term plans for the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile and supporting infrastructure. Right before I left the Union of Concerned Scientists, I co-wrote an analysis with Hans Kristensen, Director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists and Stephen Young, Senior Analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, of NNSA’s SSMP for fiscal year 2012. Over the next week, UCS and FAS will be publishing that analysis in a series of four joint blogs.

Today’s post, titled Nuclear Plan Conflicts with New Budget Realities, includes a detailed analysis of NNSA’s spending strategy over the next decade and beyond. Among the pieces of noteworthy information is that NNSA’s high-end budget estimate for nuclear weapons spending between FY12 and FY24, when it plans to complete construction of two major production facilities, is more than $120 billion.

Our key conclusion, echoed by Kingston in his analysis of the Senate version of the FY 2012 Energy and Water Appropriations bill, is that the recent deal to increase the debt limit means that the funding curve for NNSA's weapons programs is likely to flatten out as opposed to drive upwards as projected.

You can read the entire post with all of its glorious details on the FAS blog or on the UCS blog.

Just FYI. It is the same piece in both links because this is a joint project between the Federation of American Scientists and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

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National Nuclear Security Administration, Nuclear Weapons Complex, Congress, Budget, Nukes on a Blog (all tags)

The search for federal budget savings was apparent as the Senate Appropriations Committee released its version of the fiscal year 2012 Energy and Water Appropriations Bill on September 7. While the Committee recommended $7.19 billion for nuclear weapons programs, approximately $250 million more than the fiscal year 2011 enacted level and over $800 million more than the fiscal year 2010 enacted level, it made major strides in addressing some excessive and wasteful nuclear weapons programs.

The Committee took on the Life Extension Program (LEP) for the B-61 bomb, the plan to build the Uranium Processing Facility and the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Nuclear Facility at the same time, and Scaled Experiments. The Committee’s strong language on LEPs and construction projects is a welcome surprise. These programs were a central part of the nuclear weapons funding debate that took place in the context of the consideration of the New START treaty for much of the past two years.  

The Committee made it clear that the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) cannot complete all of its major life extension and construction projects as planned and sustain its other activities given the current fiscal environment.  Rather than move forward with multiple programs that are unlikely to be completed on time or on budget, the Senate bill provides NNSA with a good opportunity to prioritize the programs that are most essential to its primary mission, which is to maintain the U.S. nuclear stockpile in the absence of nuclear testing.

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Nukes on a Blog, Congress, Budget, Nuclear Weapons, National Nuclear Security Administration (all tags)

In a recent interview with the Los Alamos Monitor, Kingston Reif correctly noted that, given the current budget environment and the recently passed debt limit deal, Congress is likely to continue to closely scrutinize the major construction projects within the Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).  

In February 2011, the new Republican-led House proposed to cut over $300 million from NNSA’s Fiscal Year (FY) 2011 request of $7 billion for weapons activities in its version of a year long continuing resolution for FY 2011 (nearly all of this money was restored in the final continuing resolution passed by Congress in April).

On July 13, the House approved the FY 2012 Energy and Water Appropriations Bill, which includes a cut of nearly $500 million to the FY 2012 request of $7.63 billion for weapons activities and a reduction of over $150 million to the Mixed Oxide (MOX) fuel program (see here for my full analysis of the bill).  Even with a $500 million cut to weapons activities in FY 2012, the Committee’s recommendation is still a three percent increase over the FY 2011 level.  NNSA would still have more than enough money to maintain a safe, secure, and reliable stockpile.

In its report on the bill, the Appropriations Committee stated that “the economic crisis requires that NNSA proceed with its modernization activities in a responsible manner and the Committee is seriously concerned with the recent cost growth reported for construction of the Uranium Processing Facility (UPF) and the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement (CMRR) Project.”

NNSA has a long history of poor management and cost overruns, which has made it a fixture on the Government Accountability Office’s “High Risk List”.

This cost growth is actually far worse than previously understood.

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Nukes on a Blog, Congress, department of energy, nuclear weapons, budget (all tags)