
It will take all summer to finalize a plan aimed at hastening construction of a key nuclear-weapon-component factory that has fallen behind schedule in South Carolina, a Pentagon official said Tuesday in a congressional hearing. It is nearly the end of the annual budget-hearing season in Washington, and federal agencies including the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear-weapons agency, have now made multiple appearances before the congressional committees that authorize and appropriate their annual budgets.…