Congressional panels will mark up Department of Energy budget legislation this week, beginning with the House’s first draft of the agency’s 2019 budget Monday evening.
The House Appropriations Energy and Water development subcommittee is scheduled to mark up its version of the agency’s 2019 budget Monday at 5:30 p.m. in Washington. Then, on Wednesday, the House Armed Services Committee will mark up the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act, which sets policy and spending limits for nuclear weapons programs managed by the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).
The 2019 appropriations bill includes:
- $15.3 billion for the NNSA, which is two percent above the request, and exactly what the House Armed Services Committee’s version of the 2019 NDAA would authorize.
- $6.9 billion for Cold War nuclear-waste-cleanup programs run by the Department of Energy’s Environmental Management office. That is four-and-a-half percent more than the request and about three percent lower than the 2018 appropriation.
- More than $265 million, split between the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, to restart the department’s effort to license Yucca Mountain in Nye County, Nev., as a permanent nuclear-waste repository. That more than double what the Donald Trump administration requested. The extra funding “will be used to accelerate progress toward meeting the federal government’s legal obligation to take responsibility for storing the nation’s nuclear waste,” the subcommittee wrote in a summary of its bill.
Among other things, the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act includes:
- Authorization for the NNSA to begin work in 2019 on a new low-yield, submarine-launched, ballistic-missile warhead called for in February as part of the Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review. The weapon will be a dialed-down version of the current W76 warhead. The bill also would lift a prohibition that prevents NNSA from starting work on certain nuclear-warhead modifications without congressional permission.
- Funding to continue building the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C. NNSA wants to cancel this plutonium disposal plant, which was designed to turn 34 metric tons of weapon-grade plutonium into commercial reactor fuel as part of an arms-control pact with Russia. However, the bill includes language similar to last year’s defense authorization act, which allows NNSA to cancel the facility if it can prove an alternative disposal method is half as expensive as finishing the plant.
The Senate is set to mark up its version of the National Defense Authorization Act later this month. The upper chamber has not yet set markup dates for its 2019 Department of Energy budget bill.
