Nuclear Watch New Mexico reviews proposed Fiscal Year 2024 federal budget and finds some very alarming things, March 13, 2023:
Biden Releases Record NNSA Nuclear Weapons Budget
Santa Fe, NM – President Biden has released his proposed FY 2024 budget for the Department of Energy’s semi-autonomous nuclear weapons agency, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The budget for NNSA’s “Total Weapons Activities” for nuclear weapons research and production programs is slated to increase by 10% to $18.8 billion.
A major element in the NNSA budget request is “Plutonium Modernization,” which in reality is the expanded production of plutonium “pit” bomb cores. Pit production has been the choke point of resumed U.S. industrial-scale production of nuclear weapons ever since a 1989 FBI raid investigating environmental crimes closed the Rocky Flats Plant near Denver. The Pentagon has called expanded pit production the #1 modernization issue. The Biden Administration proposes to fund it at $2.77 billion, down 4.4% from the enacted appropriation in FY 2023. However, that was after NNSA asked Congress to add $500 million in FY 2023 for pit production at the Savannah River Site. In all, FY 2024 funding for pit production at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is requested at $1.76 billion (up 14%). FY 2024 funding for pit production at the Savannah River Site (SRS) is proposed at $921 million, down 27% from what Congress enacted in FY 2023.
>> full news release of our sister organization Nuclear Watch New Mexico, allied with us in the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability (ANA): https://nukewatch.org/press-release-item/nnsa-fy-2024-budget/
SRS Watch presentation, January 23, 2023, to Sierra Club, Columbia, SC, on growing role of SRS in nuclear weapons, including the proposed SRS Plutonium Bomb Plant – to make plutonium “pits” (cores, or triggers) for new nuclear weapons: SRS pit presentation January 23 2023