The House Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee approved a roughly $36-billion Department of Energy budget bill Monday, which heads to the full committee for a markup Wednesday, May 16.
The Department of Energy (DOE) would receive a 5-percent budget raise over all from 2018, if the bill the House Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee marked up becomes law. Overall, the proposed budget is about 20 percent more than the White House sought in a 2019 budget request that was released before Congress lifted spending caps on federal agencies including DOE.
The subcommittee had not released a bill report at deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor. The report, which provides a more detailed look at proposed funding for individual sites and programs, will be published a day before the full appropriations committee marks up the bill, a committee aide said by email this week.
The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) would get $15.3 billion: about 4 1/2 percent more than the 2018 appropriation and 1 1/2 percent above the 2019 request.
The bill forbids NNSA from canceling the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility under construction at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., unless the agency can prove an alternative costs no more than half what it would take to finish the program of record.
The facility is designed to turn 34 metric tons of weapon-grade plutonium into commercial reactor fuel under an arms-control pact with Russia.
On Thursday, DOE said it would cancel the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility’s plutonium-disposal mission and turn the facility into a factory for making plutonium pits: fissile nuclear weapon cores. DOE needs to produce 80 of these a year by 2030; the repurposed Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility would produce 50 a year by 2030. The balance would come from the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
