Energy Secretary Rick Perry is set to testify before Congress on Thursday about his agency’s fiscal 2019 budget request, which would sharply increase spending on active nuclear weapons programs while keeping funding for Cold War nuclear-waste cleanup roughly flat.
Perry is scheduled to appear before the House Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee at 10 a.m. Eastern time Thursday. The proceedings will be webcast. This is the first Department of Energy budget hearing of the 2019 appropriations cycle, which began in February when the Donald Trump administration released its federal funding request for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1.
While lawmakers are likely to use significant portions of their public time with Perry to discuss proposed cuts to non-nuclear parts of DOE, several potentially controversial nuclear issues could spark fireworks Thursday.
For one, DOE has again proposed canceling the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility in Aiken, S.C.: a major nuclear nonproliferation construction project the agency’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has contracted out to CB&I AREVA MOX Services. House lawmakers strongly support the project, which DOE has tried to cancel for three years under two successive presidential administrations.
Also, DOE has again proposed transferring responsibility for excess nuclear-weapon facilities from the NNSA to the agency’s Office of Environmental Management (EM). The White House wants $150 million for this work in 2019, which would pay to turn NNSA facilities at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California over to EM. That is nearly double the funding the House was willing to provide for those projects in a fiscal 2018 budget bill the chamber passed last summer before spending negotiations broke down and forced Congress to extend DOE’s 2017 budget. The 2017 budget did not include funding for transfer of excess facilities.
Meanwhile, DOE has again proposed restarting its application to license Yucca Mountain in Nye County, Nev., as a permanent repository for defense and civilian nuclear waste. The department wants $120 million for the effort in 2019: the same amount it requested in 2018. The House granted the request, but the Senate — where restarting Yucca proved politically impossible last year — has not.
As part of a roughly $30-billion DOE budget request for 2019, the Trump administration wants to increase annual spending on active NNSA nuclear weapons programs by $2 billion, to $15 billion. For the Cold War nuclear cleanup programs managed by DOE EM, the Trump administration requested $6.6 billion: a little more than $180 million above the 2017 budget.
