The full House on Wednesday approved a fiscal year 2023 Department of Energy budget bill that provides more or less the requested funding for DOE’s nuclear weapons and waste programs and a small increase over the request for nuclear energy programs.
The 2023 Energy and Water Appropriations Act, part of a package of six spending bills approved 220-207 Wednesday afternoon in a party line vote, must now be reconciled with yet-to-be-published spending proposals that the Senate Armed Services Committee planned to release by the end of July.
The House’s version of DOE’s budget included:
- About $21 billion for nuclear weapons programs at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA),$180 million below the request but more than $750 million higher than the 2021 appropriation. The bill funds construction of plutonium pit production plants at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina at the requested levels. It also allows NNSA to continue maintaining the B83 megaton-capable gravity bomb that the Joe Biden administration wanted to cancel, though it does not fund the NNSA’s share of the sea-launched, nuclear cruise missile the admin advocates killing.
- Some $7.9 billion for nuclear-weapons cleanup at DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, even with the request and about flat year-over-year. The House Appropriations Committee did not agree to increase liquid waste cleanup at the Hanford Site in Washington state at the expense of solid-waste cleanup there, as the administration asked in a last-minute supplemental budget request published in June.
- Nearly $1.8 billion for civilian nuclear energy and waste programs at the Office of Nuclear Energy, around $110 million more than the request and the 2021 appropriation. The bill would let DOE move money for its consent-based siting program for power-plant spent nuclear fuel into the office’s Integrated Waste Management Systems subprogram from the Nuclear Waste Disposal account — something DOE asked Congress to do last year but which lawmakers refused.
Meanwhile, the 82 year-old chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee suffered a setback this week in his recovery from hip replacement surgery necessitated after a recent fall at home.
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) had a second surgery on Tuesday after a hip replacement surgery June 30 to treat injuries sustained in the fall at his house in McLean, Va., a Leahy spokesperson wrote in a statement emailed to the press on Wednesday.
“Senator Leahy was back in his rehabilitation room by Tuesday evening and is once again working diligently with the physical therapists to return home as soon as possible,” the spokesperson wrote.
