March 17, 2014

SENATE ARMED SERVICES PANEL DELAYING SUPPORT OF NNSA CMRR-NF REPROGRAMMING

By ExchangeMonitor

The Senate Armed Services Committee appears willing to support a National Nuclear Security Administration plan to reprogram $120 million in Fiscal Year 2012 funds for an alternate plutonium sustainment strategy, with a catch: that the agency use part of the money to keep the deferred Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement-Nuclear Facility alive. Suggesting he was disappointed that NNSA “undermined” Congress by deferring the project, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and an opponent of the Administration’s plan to defer construction of CMRR-NF for at least five years, said in a Sept. 19 letter to acting Department of Energy Deputy Chief Financial Officer Joanne Choi that the panel views the NNSA’s deferral of the project as a cancellation. In his letter, Levin said the committee was deferring action on the Sept. 13 reprogramming request, but he left the door open for support and suggested it would work with the NNSA and the Pentagon to “ensure that resources adequately meet both our near-term alternative plutonium sustainment and the long-term CMRR-NF needs. … The Committee is willing to provide funding for the alternative plutonium strategy as long as a portion of the $120 million is utilized to reconstitute the CMRR-NF facility in support of the New START Treaty,” Levin wrote in the letter, which was distributed by the Union of Concerned Scientists yesterday.

While appropriators have signed off on the NNSA’s alternate plan, providing no funding for the project in the recently passed six-month Fiscal Year 2013 Continuing Resolution, House and Senate authorizers threw their support behind the CMRR-NF project in their versions of the FY 2013 Defense Authorization Act. “A central tenant of our arms control policy is that as we draw down to fewer numbers of warheads, we will reduce the hedge or backup warheads, relying instead on an ability to reconstitute the hedge, based on a sound plutonium science capability provided by the CMRR-NF,” Levin wrote. “The cancellation decision and this associated reprogramming runs counter to the policy of relying on responsive infrastructure and stockpile stewardship science rather than deployed or hedge warheads.”

Levin suggested that coupled with the $800 million to $1.13 billion estimated cost of the alternate plutonium strategy, the five-year delay would drive the facility’s price tag up to between $5.6 and $7.2 billion. “The sheer size of this cost escalation could lead to an inability to construct the CMRR-NF as proposed by the NNSA five years from now, an unacceptable worst case scenario that leaves our nation worse off in its ability to conduct plutonium science and engineering at Los Alamos,” Levin wrote.

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