LANL could get budget bump for pit production
Funding would increase half of a million dollars under Biden’s proposed 2024 spending plan
Los Alamos National Laboratory and its plutonium work deemed vital in modernizing the nuclear arsenal would get a sizable funding increase in President Joe Biden’s proposed budget for the coming fiscal year.
Although this early draft of the U.S. Energy Department’s funding is expected to be reworked — along with the rest of the president’s budget — the nuclear weapons portion tends to come through the yearly political tussle intact because both major parties view the arsenal as vital to national security.
The proposed budget calls for increasing the Los Alamos lab’s funding to $4.5 billion from this year’s $4 billion.
The White House is requesting $1.76 billion for the lab’s plutonium modernization and daily operations, up from this year’s $1.55 billion.
Plutonium work is at the heart of the lab’s goal to make 30 nuclear bomb triggers, or “pits,” by 2026 to modernize the stockpile and equip two new warheads with the detonating cores.
The National Nuclear Security Administration, the Energy Department’s branch that oversees the arsenal, would get $23.8 billion under this proposal, a significant bump from the $22.1 billion it received this year.
“We are working to create an enterprise that provides the United States with flexibility and resiliency to respond to a changing geopolitical environment and the budget request directly supports these efforts,” NNSA Administrator Jill Hruby said in a statement.
About $18.8 billion of the nuclear agency’s funding would be related to nuclear weapons, including modernization, infrastructure upgrades, nuclear
nonproliferation efforts, counterterrorism and naval reactors.
Aside from funding the lab’s pursuit of pit production, the proposed budget would funnel $2.77 billion to Savannah River Site in South Carolina to make an additional 50 pits a year by the mid-2030s. That’s slightly less than the $2.9 billion Savannah River got this year for the endeavor.
The Trump administration’s nuclear strategy called for the lab and Savannah River to produce no fewer than a combined 80 pits a year by 2030. Biden’s nuclear plan doesn’t specify a required number of pits to be made, but Hruby has stated her agency is sticking with the 80-pit goal. She has indicated it might not be reached until 2036.
In a recent public town hall, Los Alamos lab Director Thom Mason emphasized the purpose of the pits is to sustain, not expand, the arsenal. However, the weapons’ capabilities would improve.
The new pits will be key in replacing the outdated Minuteman class of missile with a next-generation intercontinental ballistic missile called the Sentinel. The pits also will equip the new W93 warhead, designed by the lab to be launched from submarines.
The president, Pentagon officials, some political leaders and Mason contend modernizing the stockpile is necessary to deter Russia, China, Iran and rogue nations from acting rashly with nuclear weapons.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s threats to unleash nuclear weapons on countries that intervene in the war his nation launched in Ukraine have raised the stakes and underscored the need to shore up deterrence, these leaders say. Putin’s decision to no longer take part in the arms control treaty known as START has made the situation even tenser, they say.
In an email, a watchdog group based in Washington, D.C., bashed what it described as military officials, defense contractors and hawkish politicians pushing for a fatter nuclear budget to wade deeper into an arms race.
“The weapons contractors and labs have leveraged world events to stoke a drive for new nuclear arms,” wrote Geoff Wilson, director of the Center for Defense Information at the Project on Government Oversight. “Unfortunately, we could very quickly be in a place where there are no nuclear constraints on the world’s largest arsenals.”
By continuing to spend more money beefing up its nuclear capabilities, the U.S. will encourage other countries to do likewise, Wilson contends.
The U.S. already maintains the most powerful and reliable nuclear arsenal in the world and aims to spend nearly $2 trillion upgrading the weapons in the next 20 to 30 years, with major new systems set to come online in the coming decade, he wrote.
“Despite what self-interested parties may say, I don’t think that we actually are capable of buying any more nuclear defense than we already have,” Wilson argued. “When you already have the power to destroy the world, does destroying it two or three times moreover ... really gain you anything?”