The Bush administration’s reliable replacement warhead program and plans to overhaul nuclear weapons production facilities earned a “D” in a report card from the Alliance on Nuclear Accountability.

The alliance, a coalition of groups from communities downwind or downstream of Energy Department research, testing, production and waste disposal sites, cited the estimated $150 billion cost, among other things, of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s program to build a new type of weapon and refit production facilities.

The report said a decision should wait until the next Nuclear Posture Review is issued in 2009.

That review will fall to the next administration, which will be in the position to make key decisions about the nation’s nuclear future.

“The major focus of the report is the message of what the new administration needs to do,” said Bob Schaeffer, an alliance spokesman. “We’ve seen that this administration does not plan to fulfill its responsibilities, and we’re looking at the next administration, whoever that is, to turn around the Department of Energy and nuclear weapons policy.”

John Broehm, a spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration, countered that the reliable replacement warhead program is part of the administration’s plans to reduce and secure the stockpile.

“What a surprise, an anti-nuclear weapons group doesn’t approve of how NNSA is managing the nuclear weapons complex,” Broehm said. “As the size of the nuclear weapons stockpile continues to go down, it is important the Cold War-era infrastructure becomes smaller and more efficient along with it. We will continue to move forward on downsizing our nuclear weapons complex and stockpile, despite ANA’s misplaced criticism.”

Broehm said the Bush administration has reduced the nuclear stockpile to its lowest levels since the Eisenhower years, cutting the overall number of warheads in half by last year and aiming for another 15 percent reduction in the near future.

“It’s going to be one-quarter the level it was at the height of the Cold War,” Broehm said.

The number of warheads in the U.S. nuclear arsenal is classified, he said.

The reliable replacement warhead program has been a point of contention since the Department of Energy began it in 2004; the intention, NNSA officials have said, is to make sure the nation’s nuclear stockpile is safe, secure and easy to maintain, given that testing and development of new warheads has declined since the end of the Cold War.

The rationale for the program has not been to increase the number of warheads in the stockpile but to develop a replacement warhead that meets the changing needs of the military and also develop weapons that can be disabled if they fall in the wrong hands, as current weapons cannot be retrofitted with disabling technology, Broehm said.

Additionally, the reliable replacement warhead program could reduce the number of warheads by doing away with the need to store additional weapons as a hedge against possible malfunction of the aging stockpile, he said.

Critics of the program have said the current weapons are perfectly reliable, having been tested extensively since 1945, and contend that building more warheads violates the international Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and could damage national security by angering allies and enemies.

According to the report, although Congress zeroed out funding in the budget this fiscal year, prohibiting development of the new warhead until the administration made plans to downsize the stockpile, the administration requested up to $90 million potentially connected to the program for fiscal 2009.

That request is spread across several areas of President Bush’s 2009 budget request for the NNSA, Schaeffer said: $10 million for reliable replacement warhead design is included under “directed stockpile work” and $53.6 million in part to develop the plutonium trigger; $20 million is included under “science campaign” for the reliable replacement warhead advance certification program; and the $10 million is included under “enhanced surety” for the evaluation of future system options, including life-extension programs for the reliable replacement program.

Matt Korade can be reached at mkorade@cq.com.