March 17, 2014

CMRR-NF FACILITY TO BE ‘INDEFINITELY DEFERRED’

By ExchangeMonitor

The Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement-Nuclear Facility project planned for Los Alamos National Laboratory will be “indefinitely deferred,” according to President Obama’s Fiscal Year 2013 budget request that will be released today. Nuclear weapons complex observers and Los Alamos officials have long expected a massive cut to the multi-billion-dollar construction project, but the exact approach to a project that was a part of the Administration’s New START Treaty bargain has remained in doubt. A Pentagon official suggested that the language would give the Administration the ability to delay the project until after the equally expensive Uranium Processing Facility is built at the Y-12 National Security Complex, if it chooses to build it at all, without killing the project altogether.

Several nuclear activist groups have called for the project to be terminated in recent weeks. On Friday, the Union of Concerned Scientists formally joined the opposition, arguing in a report that uncertainty about the need to expand pit production at Los Alamos, possible additional reductions to the nation’s nuclear stockpile, and the potential for other options for handling plutonium and other radioactive materials, drive the need to rethink the facility. “There is no compelling reason to build this facility now,” Lisbeth Gronlund, co-author of the report and co-director of UCS’s Global Security Program, ‘said. “And there may not be any reason to build it at all.”

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