By George Lobsenz
The House Armed Services Committee, acting on its defense authorization bill for fiscal year 2009, this week approved sharp increases for several Energy Department nonproliferation programs and added $20 million for the department’s nuclear cleanup program, which the committee suggested was being under-funded by DoE.
However, it rejected funding for the Bush administration’s Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP), saying the plan to rejuvenate spent reactor fuel reprocessing and recycling raised proliferation concerns. The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the semi-autonomous DoE agency that runs the department’s nuclear weapons complex, had sought $6.9 million for GNEP, but the House panel said it found the administration’s arguments in favor of GNEP “unpersuasive.”
The House action mirrored action taken on GNEP by the Senate Armed Services Committee in its fiscal 2009 defense authorization bill, which was approved earlier this month. The Senate bill bars DoE from using money earmarked for nonproliferation programs for GNEP; senators also cut $15 million sought by NNSA for various programs that the committee said were associated with GNEP.
In a press release providing some details on its defense authorization bill, the House panel gave a strong overall endorsement to DoE’s nonproliferation program, saying they are “critical to U.S. national security and must be a top priority.”
In particular, the panel gave substantial additional funds to DoE’s Global Threat Reduction Initiative, which it funded at $389.6 million, an increase of $170 million. Among other programs, the committee said the extra money was “accelerating the conversion of domestic and international research reactors from using highly-enriched uranium to low- enriched uranium, securing domestic and international sites with high-priority radiological sources and removing radiological sources inside and outside the U.S.”
The panel also backed continued construction of the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, granting DoE’s full request for $487 million for the plant being built at DoE’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina to convert surplus weapons plutonium to uranium-plutonium fuel for use in commercial reactors. Some congressional critics say the so-called MOX facility is an unjustifiably expensive boondoggle, and that the plutonium could be disposed of in much less expensive ways.
On DoE’s cleanup program for its heavily contaminated nuclear weapons sites, the department provided a $20 million increase–a relative drop in the bucket given that the program overall is funded at more than $5 billion.
However, in a nod to concerns expressed by states hosting DoE sites that the department is not meeting cleanup commitments, the panel said in its press release: “The committee is concerned that total life-cycle cleanup cost estimates are increasing while overall funding for the defense environmental management program has been decreasing. The committee…urges the Department of Energy to put additional resources into environmental management in future budget requests.”