Administration proposes 23%, 5-year nuke budget increase

The Department of Energy’s “weapons activities” budget line item, which funds work at Los Alamos and Sandia national labs, would rise 4 percent next year under the administration’s request, with steady increases in subsequent years, according to a summary released by the Office of Management and Budget. Central to the funding for the budget increases, in a time of overall tight federal budgets, is a budget transfer from the Defense Department to the Department of Energy, the agency that funds lab work. From the OMB summary:

NNSA’s request reflects the partnership between NNSA and the DOD to maintain and modernize the nuclear deterrent. The DOD’s NNSA Program Support account has the amounts for Weapons Activities that are shown in the table below, underscoring the close link between these activities and DOD nuclear weapons-related requirements and missions. The OMB will ensure that future budget year allocations to NNSA occur in the required amounts.

Michael Coleman, our DC bureau guy who was at the main DOE budget briefing, reports that Daniel R. Poneman, DOE’s deputy secretary, said  the weapons increase reflects Obama’s commitment to maintaining an effective nuclear arsenal.

More highlights:

• proposed Los Alamos cleanup spending: $215 million, up 16 percent from this year
• WIPP: $203 million, down 5 percent from this year
• Total Los Alamos DOE spending: $1.96 billion, up 7 percent from this year
• Total Sandia: $1.8 billion, flat compared to this year

Previously: The Obama administration’s proposed 2014 budget, to be rolled out today, will reportedly include a request for a $500 million increase (about 7 percent) in the National Nuclear Security Administration’s “weapons activities” budget, which funds Los Alamos and Sandia labs in New Mexico, according to a report this morning from the Center for Public Integrity, a non-profit, non-partisan news organization. (The report’s lead author is R. Jeffrey Smith, former Washington Post defense beat reporter.)

The key elements, according to Smith’s report:

• the budget will support work on a multi-billion uranium facility in Tennessee
• the administration will support continued refurbishment on aging US nuclear weapons, including the B61 life extension program, a major project at Sandia
• a South Carolina project to convert surplus weapons plutonium to a material suitable for use in nuclear reactor fuel will be cut

Journal Washington DC correspondent Michael Coleman and I will be covering the briefings and reading the documents today to flesh this out. Unanswered questions include:

• how much money will be set aside for environmental cleanup work at Los Alamos
• the budget for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant outside Carlsbad
• decisions about a strategy at Los Alamos for meeting the nation’s plutonium research and management needs in the absence of work on a new plutonium lab at the northern New Mexico lab