Former Sen. Peter Domenici (R-N.M.), a stalwart ally of virtually all things nuclear in his state, died Wednesday following complications from abdominal surgery, the Albuquerque Journal reported. He was 85.
Domenici was first elected to the Senate in 1972 and served six terms. During his Senate career, he chaired the chamber’s Energy Committee and Budget Committee, and served on the Appropriations Committee: an assignment he used to steer funding to the state’s Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories, and to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP).
“Beloved at Los Alamos for decades, no one has understood and supported the essential and enduring national security mission of Los Alamos better than Senator Pete Domenici,” Charles McMillan, director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, wrote in a statement Wednesday. “His commitment and determination to ensuring a strong Laboratory into the future is evidenced by his unwavering support for bringing cutting-edge supercomputing facilities to the Laboratory and ensuring the Laboratory possessed unsurpassed technical capabilities to counter threats to this country from abroad.”
Domenici remained protective of New Mexico’s nuclear complex well after he left the Senate in 2009. Last year, he penned a snarling, widely distributed defense of WIPP after the prime contractor for the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility in South Carolina commissioned a study that concluded the New Mexico facility was an unsuitable disposal site for surplus weapon-grade plutonium the Energy Department wants to remove from the U.S. stockpile.
News of Domenici’s death prompted an outpouring of sympathy Wednesday, including from one of the former senator’s old colleagues from across the aisle.
“Pete was an indispensable leader in the post-Cold War effort to protect the American people,” former Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), co-chairman of the Washington-based Nuclear Threat Initiative, wrote in a statement. “Pete knew that we could use uranium to benefit hundreds of millions of people or we could use it to destroy” the Earth.
Among Domenici’s surviving children is Adam Paul Laxalt, the Nevada state attorney general who is now in the vanguard of the Silver State’s fight against the planned Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. The nuclear industry sees Yucca as a crucial to the health and growth of the U.S. atomic energy fleet.
