The House Armed Services Committee, which has staunchly backed the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement-Nuclear Facility in the face of the Administration’s push to defer construction of the facility, isn’t signing off on the National Nuclear Security Administration’s request to reprogram $120 million for an alternate plutonium strategy. The committee, led by Chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) and Michael Turner (R-Ohio), the chairman of the House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee, notified the Department of Energy of its opposition last week in a letter, joining its colleagues on the Senate Armed Services Committee in opposing the alternate plutonium strategy. Both committees had outlined their opposition to the Administration’s CMRR-NF decision, seeking to restart the project in their versions of the Fiscal Year 2013 Defense Authorization Act while House and Senate Appropriations Committees supported the deferral. Last month, the Senate Armed Services Committee deferred a decision on the alternate plutonium strategy reprogramming request, urging DOE to keep the CMRR-NF project on life support.
The HASC decision, however, did not enjoy the support of at least some Democrats on the committee. Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Calif.), the ranking member of the Strategic Forces panel, suggested the decision to withhold support for the reprogramming request jeopardized the NNSA’s plutonium sustainment mission. Sanchez was among a contingent of Democrats on the committee that opposed its decision to authorize funding for the project earlier this year and move its management to the Department of Defense. “I am concerned that the long-term deferral of the funding for the plutonium sustainment strategy may put at risk our ability to meet requirements for increasing pit production capacity in a timely way and for sustaining critical warhead life extension programs,” Sanchez said in a statement to NW&M Monitor. “This de-facto lengthy deferral is all the more questionable as it risks delaying a cost-effective path forward identified in place of wasting taxpayer money on a $6 billion plutonium facility that the nuclear weapons laboratories, NNSA, and the Department of Defense, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff and STRATCOM, say we do not need in the near-term. We cannot run the technical or financial risk of delaying a viable, affordable strategy for ensuring the safety, security and reliability of critical warheads.”
