Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

4. Department of Defense · Notable · Needs Congress

Accelerate restoration of plutonium pit production

Partially done

125 4. Department of Defense

“Accelerate the effort to restore plutonium pit production, which is essential both for modern warhead programs and for recapitalizing the stockpile.”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    The FY2026 NDAA sec. 3112 recodifies the plutonium pit production capacity requirement as 10 U.S.C. 6128, keeping the schedule - not less than 30 war reserve pits during 2026 and not less than 80 during 2030 - and adding certification and reporting duties on both covered projects, including joint certifications by the Assistant Secretary for Environmental Management and the Deputy Administrator for Defense Programs at each critical decision milestone. The funding table authorizes Los Alamos Pit Production at $982,263,000, the 21-D-512 Plutonium Pit Production Project at Los Alamos at $509,316,000 and the 21-D-511 Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility at $1,130,000,000. Money and statutory deadlines are in place; no allowlisted source records the enterprise producing at the required rate.

  2. Partially done

    Section 20008(b) of the reconciliation act (P.L. 119-21) appropriated acceleration money to the NNSA: $750,000,000 to accelerate primary capability modernization - primaries are pits - $1,000,000,000 to accelerate construction of NNSA facilities, $540,000,000 for deferred maintenance and repair and $200,000,000 for Phase 1 studies, all available until 2029.

  3. Attempted

    The National Nuclear Security Administration published a Notice of Intent to prepare a Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement for Plutonium Pit Production - the environmental review that has to be completed before the enterprise can be expanded beyond its current sites and rates. A notice of intent starts a process and changes nothing.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

A three-step sequence, each step dated separately. The ask needs an act of Congress; it is partial on the ladder for such asks (enacted in part - the acceleration appropriations and the recodified schedule - with the 80-pit target unmet).

  • The 30-pits-in-2026 and 80-pits-in-2030 requirements originate in the FY2015 NDAA and predate the window; sec. 3112 moves them into title 10 rather than creating them, which is why the recodification alone would not carry the item.
  • Recorded negative, 2026-09-06. NNSA’s article index at energy.gov/nnsa/articles does not exist and never did; the live index is at energy.gov/nnsa/listings/nnsa-news, which pages through the archive. Pages 0–9 were read: 97 distinct articles, newest 2026-09-03, oldest 2024-02-01, covering the whole evidence window. Three touch plutonium at all — the first W87-1 pit diamond-stamped (published 2024-10-01, before the window, dated from the article’s own publication timestamp), the final Supplemental EIS and Amended Record of Decision for Enhanced Plutonium Facility Utilization at Lawrence Livermore (2026-05-21, an R&D materials increase, not war-reserve production), and the final Surplus Plutonium Disposition EIS. None reports a war-reserve pit production rate, and none is the certification. The Federal Register records we keep and search carry exactly two plutonium records in the window (2025-08140, the pit-production PEIS notice of intent already cited, and 2025-20208, a process change for the Sandia and Livermore EISs). The negative therefore reaches NNSA’s own published announcements and the Federal Register; it does not reach the annual certification under 10 U.S.C. 6128(b), which is made to the congressional defense committees and is not published anywhere. Some instruments never enter the Federal Register, and this is one: the record that would carry this is a report to Congress. The rung is unchanged, and there is nothing on a public NNSA page for a person with a browser to find either.
Action
restore
Object
plutonium pit production
ID
258